IMO it's not just the attitudes of the guys hunting here that hold things back.......its the sheer NUMBER of guys as well. It creates an undeniable feeling of pressure for a lot of guys who don't have exclusive hunting rights that there is another guy behind every tree and if they don't shoot that 2.5yr old 8pt now he isn't making it out of the woodlot that night let alone the rifle season to come.

PA will never be the state most of us want simply because of the numbers involved and land breakdown. I hunt private land myself here in York Co. and I can't tell you the last bowhunt I had where I didn't encounter another bowhunter , pheasant hunter, dirt bike rider, dog walker, screaming kid, or any number of distractions. For many of us it's too many people trying to have their own slice of the pie and it happens very seldom.

I can tell you on one small sensitive property I hunt, I watched 3 bucks last season that would EASILY, and I mean EASILY make book about every other night working a bean field. Watching the wind, glassing from a distance etc etc.
and then one day they all just vanished, even the small bucks that I could count on night after night...........surprise surprise, 2 other hunters that I ran into a couple days before the season told me they walked the entire property a couple times the week before the opener, and hung stands all over (in all the wrong spots) and changed the patterns of those deer completely before I even got a single crack at them.
Thats the other issue you run into here......if a landowner is kind enough to allow you to hunt chances are they are the "hate deer" type and they allow ANYONE who asks permission on to help take the deer and it becomes counterproductive. Unless it's a family farm or you are paying for an exclusive lease 9 times out of 10 there are multiple guys who consider that private farm "Their spot".
It's hard to get your hopes up around here.........sure it happens now and then but man do the moon and stars and planets need to line up big time where I live.

Look up how many resident bowhunters IL, KS, IA, and PA have........