In my experience (besides the already mentioned hardcore raid groups), most people who participate in PTR do so casually to get a preview of the upcoming content, and PTR have a much lower population, and no progress can be applied to your characters on the live servers. Because of this, I don't think it would have changed anything about the implementation of hunts. There would be few people doing them and thus little competition. So the majority of problems associated with the hunt wouldn't have happened on the PTR.