More on Hit Rating and 41/20/0

The following is an email I wrote to a friend, asking for his opinion on my quest to figure out how hit rating relates to the combat mutilate build.

"The thing about me critting is that I need crits to generate combo points. This is what I worked out. If I replaced my rare agility and crit rating gems with the appropriate socket color hit rating gem, my stats go from...

1598 / 24.38% / 182 to 1562 / 22.06% / 222

I lose 36 attack power, 2.32% crit chance, and gain 40 hit rating. Not to mention it would cost me about 400 gold to resocket all of these gems.

Here is my dilemma, figuring out if the reduction in those stats will affect my overall damage negatively or positively. Supposedly, I missed 36 regular white attacks during the nspite fight. Of the ones that landed and didnt crit, the average damage was 305. Had I not missed any of those, I would have added at lease (36 * 305) 10,980 points of damage. This of course increases as you think about that any one of these could have procced mongoose or instant poison. Losing 36 attack power is about 2.5 dps. But what happens to Mutilate? Since my spec is based on combo point generation, will I have less combo points to work with, or will it even out and maybe now I wont feel like I have TOO many combo points and that some are wasted energy (2 or 3
point evisc for only a few hundred damage). BRKs stats showed that I crit about
33% of the time on my white attacks. It would seem that reducing that to
30% may not be that big of a deal?

Honestly, I don't think that I need to be doing any more damage than I am doing right now, since I'm head and shoulders above everyone else in raids, except for BRK.

What do you think? Is it worth it for me to spend 400 gold just to try and do THAT much
more dps? Or should I just wait and let my hit rating climb as I continue to get new gear? Or the opposite? Should I stack hit rating now and let new gear settle me back into increasing attack power and crit?"

Anyone out there care to comment on that at all? I'm just very cautious about changing something that works so incredibly well, just because other people say its the right thing to do. Jabari pointed out that hit rating is probably more important for combat/sword spec rogues because the build is heavily reliant on procs (extra attack and combat potency). Hmm...