Let me say at the start that its refreshing to read different opinions on this topic that are reasonable regardless of the opinion the writer holds.
I'm a New Yorker who has hunted big game for 39 years. I am hardly rich and there is often month left over at the end of the money. Several years back I got involved in elk hunting in the West. Our first trip, in Montana, we used a good friend to help us set up a spike camp. We used his horses but our equipment. The cost of the equipment like tents and stoves collected over the years is quite high. Not to mention getting all that stuff out to Montana. He purchased food for us before we arrived and we packed it in. This was a great hunt but there were serious drawbacks to doing it.
First, we were unfamiliar with the area and wasted far too much time scouting instead of hunting. Secondly, recovery of an elk takes everyone out of the "woods" while you recover a single animal.
Most hunters unfamiliar with an area most certainly won't have a spare friend with horses just down the road so they are extremely limited in what they can attempt to do. Add to this the time and cost of travel, lodging, etc. and you have a major problem.
Complain if you will about the cost of outfitters and they do get a lot of money. However, they don't make a lot of money. As pointed out the landowner has discovered he has a cash crop on his land and that is the wildlife found there. The outfitter has some extraordinary costs in running their operation and I, as an eastern hunter in love with hunting the west, have little choice but to pay the cost of doing this thing we do.