Honestly, dwarven hand cannon is currently selling for 100-200g on my server. You could likely pay for a reserve on a leaf for that price in MC. With the availability of MC pugs, I would just try and get the leaf.

Hunter weapon progression (any dungeon blue) -> Leaf.

I see many hunters joining my raid teams with https://classic.wowhead.com/item=17753/verdant-keepers-aim and quickly graduating to https://classic.wowhead.com/item=18713/rhokdelar-longbow-of-the-ancient-keepers .

I reckon Rhok'Delar also requires to kill Onyxia, wich only has 30% chance of dropping the required item.

For at least a couple of months, I have IRL issues that prevent me to play for more than a couple hours straight. Adding to that, I have 1 or 2 free evenings a week. This makes committing to a raid a bit problematic.

I will get Rhok'delar sooner or later, but since gold is not really a problem of mine, I woudn't mind spending 150g to get pre raid BiS. BUT I didn't think about paying for a reservation in pugs... that could work.
Thanks

https://classic.wowhead.com/item=2099/dwarven-hand-cannon

is the better weapon. It boils down to if you want to spend that amount of money to get it.

After some research I found that as a dwarf it is considerably better:

hit chance cap goes from 9% to 6%:
https://www.wowhead.com/news=292085/hit-cap-in-classic-wow-clarifications#targetText=Blizzard%20has%20confirmed%20that%20the,a%20Defense%20Skill%20of%20315

https://github.com/magey/classic-warrior/wiki/Attack-table#weapon-skill should be the same hit chanche for ranged weapons.

Aimed and multi have been normalized in 1.10 ( they do more damage on dhc ):
https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Patch_1.10.0

Proc chance is 33% ( stated on a Reddit thread, not sure about this) which is really good considered that fire damage is not reduced by armour:
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/dcvpwb/hunters_dont_buy_dwarven_hand_cannon/

Don't get dwarven hand cannon if you PvP with Scatter Shot. When you Scatter Shot it can proc the fireblast and it will break Scatter.

Don't get dwarven hand cannon if you PvP with Scatter Shot. When you Scatter Shot it can proc the fireblast and it will break Scatter.

Ouch.
Something I didn't think about.
Thanks for the info. Saved me a hundred gold

Also, friendly reminder that https://classic.wowhead.com/item=19107/bloodseeker is regarded as pre raid BIS until you get the leaf. This won't be a factor until Phase 2 however, but just something to keep in mind if the leaf doesn't drop for you beforehand.