A Brief history of Claws (Their prime, their death, and why they are still bad atm)

Thanks for the bit of history, always interesting to see what the game was like before I played/understood the game and the meta!

In my opinion, the problem with claws is, as someone else said, the passive nodes. There aren't many of them, and they sacrifice a lot of damage for bonuses to leech (which as you point out, don't matter to at least half the claws, which only care about their LGoH).
But there's a bigger problem with the nodes, which is the lack of access to crit. If you're going claws, unless it's an ES build you pretty much want to start as shadow and go south from there. However, of the whopping two total claw crit clusters, one of them is almost always 3 points out of the way, to the north. Claws, like daggers, wands, and foils, are balanced around the idea of going crit, especially for phys builds. So the fact that claws have a harder time stacking crit is a pretty big hindrance.

I have seen Mathil rocking a claw + shield for a non-crit ele ST build (recent video on non-crit buzzsaw). Claws are still probably the best weapons for that, tied with foils, because they all have high attack speed. But, I mean, come on... no-one goes non-crit claws. And ele foils are surely more common (read: cheaper), since foils are better weapons right now.

So, in short, I agree with you that claws have problems right now. It feels like game balance left them behind, and gave away their strengths to other weapons. The biggest area where they could get a boost is the passive tree.

Lastly, I don't remember who suggested it, but it would be really cool to see a new claw/unarmed skill. Of course the skill would have to be AoE for it to help claws at all. Personally, I'd love to see claws able to use Lacerate, it seems like a perfect thematic fit.

For the record, the last good build I made that used the claw nodes was a Varunastra build.
Oh, PS, the coolest claw build I've ever seen, which uses claws to great effect, was this one.