I can't be the only one who notices this. Competitively, hunters are by far the weakest, especially since the smoke, tripmine, and throwing knife nerf.
You simply cannot argue that titans and warlocks aren't the two most competitive classes at the moment. Their abilities are one shot or near-one shot. A team of three storm callers or three strikers is much more threatening than a team of three hunters. Now that universal remote is meta, the simple fact that you can run a shotgun and sniper optimizes the titan/warlock abilities and the use for an aggressive play style. Juggernaut/Uni-V and Thunderstrike/Uni-V. You'd be lying if you said you've never played against this.
Let's take a comparative look at each of the classes grenades.
Titan: Lightning grenade. Near one shot upon first contact. Hits at ridiculous angles on the wall as the cones track. The blast does damage way outside of the animation. Hard to escape given the rate of fire and radius. Pair this with armamentarium and a team of titans with max discipline and damn near every wall will have a lightning grenade on it.
Warlocks: Scatter grenades have one shot me or almost one shot me on multiple occassions on max armor. Axion bolts, near one shots with aggressive tracking.
Both classes have sticky grenades (which track when they shouldn't) that are one shot upon contact and almost always impossible to escape. Hunters have sticky nades, but be honest, have you been killed by flux nades more often than fusion?
Now for melees.
Titan: Stormfist overload. One body shot with any primary+melee=death. Shoulder charge. Self explanatory.
Warlock: THUNDERSTRIKE+AMPLITUDE. RIDICULOUS. The only melee in existence that can hit further and more consistently than your shotgun. Didn't get that much damage with your shotgun and the enemy is too far away for another? Hit RB/R1 and you'll snipe them with your god melee.
Hunters: Smoke bombs. Everyone hated these at one point. Now, meh. Still a viable option for competitive game modes. Trap, blind, and slow. Allow for teamshot or nade spam. Throwing knife. Hardly anyone uses it, definitely not a competitive choice. Hunters by far have the weakest and slowest base melee. I'd even argue that I whiff far more than titans did in Y1.
To sum up, warlocks and titans have multiple one shot or near one shot capabilities, allowing them to play aggressively or at worst, stop a team from rushing. Their abilities allow maximum damage output with mimimal effort for clean up. Smoke grenades require you to waste your grenade charge to do more damage or for you to advance to kill or just enable you to get away. [i]This isn't a nerf post[/i]. Just a simple observation I've made in regards to how underpowered and almost useless hunters are in pvp this meta.
Eventually, I'll edit in some things I've noticed about bladedancer and gunslinger and their viability in competitive game modes or even just 6v6. Lots of people are making comparisons between the supers, I focused mostly on melees and grenades.
[b]Edit[/b]: There seems to be confusion about this post. This is not a whining post, so everyone who has not seen a game of 2k+ elo players running matador, her benevolence, thorn or whatever else can be used to pad stats, should not give any input. In games against players in the 1%, people use warlock and titan abilities to their fullest potential, (yes, hunter abilities too, I main a hunter and run my hunter everyday in 3s regardless of what I play against) unlike anything you'd see in a regular game of crucible because the majority does not know how to use them like crucible vets do. Remember, time =/= vet status in crucible. So even if you've spent 30 days, it doesn't mean a thing if you haven't improved enough to see the sort of thing that makes crucible less fun to play. With the current meta, I see more titans and warlocks in sweaty games than hunters simply because their abilities are easy to use which means that players get to maintain their stats as efficiently as possible. So yes, hunter abilities [i]are[/i] viable, but warlock and titan abilities are simply easier to use and better for this meta, so that's what sweaty kids run. For those of you saying hunters have the highest average KD and playerbase, that's because there have always been more hunter mains. That's the way bungie marketed destiny (with hunters as a main attraction), and the majority of pvpers don't care to switch because they see nothing wrong with what they play against, as seen in your comments. They don't care about stats/they haven't played against titan/warlock abilities being used at its worse.