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The overwhelming majority of those that participated in the poll (thanks!) show that hunters were the primary class leveled to 80. I just find this funny — on my hunter I tried to eliminate the scourge of the ‘huntard‘ label. I’m attempting the same on my Death Knight — eliminate the distaste rampant in the world of Azeroth for tanking DKs.
Adhedodit on 
I don’t know about others, but when I started WoW, I tried a few different things before finally using Hunter to get to 55.
In the end it came down to speed. I knew I wanted to play a DK, and prior to hunter I tried Priest: Too mushier, Mage: mushier if you can believe it, Paladin: OMG SLOW! and Druid: too confusing (to me at least at the time). Then I fell on Hunter, which had everything I could want to get me to a point where I could play DK.
Unrelated, thank you for this blog, I find it interesting to read on tanking, something I’ve thought about doing with my DK though have not had much chance to try.