"I don't think it's right for those guy's with the smokeless powder gun's to be allowed to hunt during primitive weapons season."
In those states that truly hold to the primitive weapons aspect of this, say that require one to use flintlocks, they probably do follow your views, and not allow the use of in-line and all the new stuff.
To explain it:
1) Early folks tried get these special seasons for weapons of sverely reduced capacity;
2) Game departments allowed them in part based on the fact that the impact on the resource was minimal/acceptable;
3) Gageteers and commercial interests adopt new technology to make the BP and Archery seasons acceptable to people with minimal skills or comitment, who simply want the chance to hunt longer or to get another tag.
4) the gear may make the hunters using it more effective, but since hunter numbers are down and game numbers are up in many places, 2) above remains OK even with the cheater gear.
5) The sports are transformed by the number of people using the new gear to the point where the old/real gear is no longer typical. So you need to describe real archery as "traditional" in order to distinguish it from compounds. Some day this will happen to compounds when X-bows take over.
6) some people who now know only the situation in 5) say to each other "hey, let's go to Africa"
Does this make sense? Not at first blush, but it is all part of the way stuff works in NA with commercial interests, inventiveness, and public hunting as the basis of the sport.
"Having hunted smokeless muzzleloaders, I respectfully disagree with that premise. For example, I could say, I don't think it's right for a guy to use ANY compound bow during archery season. It defeats the purpose Make it so he has to pull back 80 lbs to shoot. How would that go over in large African game hunting or ANY North American hunting. Do you think we should ban anything with a letoff? Hog"
I think you have a point on the archery thing, but it only works if that is the right decision in that case. In many places you could put x-bow into the archery picture as they are the default bow where I hunt. Compounds are some kind of zealot bow for keeners. Traditional archery is hardly even in the picture.
As it happens a lot of African states do have restrictions that require poundages of 80 pounds or a lot more to be used. These are based on the needs of the game though, not just to make the thing harder for archers, which I guess was your point regarding a thing we don't see required of archers. As it happens archery hunting for the most part did not traditionally use heavy bows.
Let-off is a bit of a myth. At the point of transition to compounds, a time I lived through. There were folks who shot recurves with sights, and rests, and releases. The guy shooting a hunting weight recurve that way was doing some serious work. But for the most part since, trad has meant some kind of snap shooting method, while compound guys hold and aim. Modern cam systems require a shooter to do a lot more work to draw the bow (at comparable poundages), and while there is let-off, at a similar point in the cycle, the arrows is long gone for most trad shooters. (A recent trend over the last 10 plus years has been trad shooters dropping draw weights a lot and using some hold system also. Mostly target archers are doing this.) Some of the science on this they teach at elite shooting schools gets a lot more complicated, but suffice it to say, ti doesn't really support the idea that compounds are easier to shoot. Of course they are a lot easier in some respects, like maintaining skill, reduced practice time, flatter trajectory. But these issues do not necesarrily translate into bigger bags. Most traditional archers when describing their gear will point out how much more challenging trad gear is, but then slip in some reasons as to why it is actually easier to shoot. Some of these reasons are real, and some are not, but it isn't all on the compound side.
On thing I have done at various times is go through the arsenal of gear I have for compound and trad shooting/hunting. Obviously gear changes all the time. But for the most part, all the trad gear I use is superior to what is available to compound archers. Even with the bows, there are many ways in which trad gear is superior to compound gear. Of course compounds do have some serious advantages too, that are decisive in certain situations.
