Personally, I don' t think any thing we use to hunt today could be considered " primitive" . Except for a long bow. Any gun that uses black powder or smokeless powder to fire a chunk of lead is no where near being " primitive" wether you use flint lock, side lock, or in line.

In the evolution of the human race, black powder and the gun are pretty dang modern. They have only been around for a couple hundred years.
Back in the day, sure but " primitive, not even close.

I have used both side locks (Hawken) and inlines and find no speed advantage in loading an inline. In fact it can sometimes be a little troublesome to get that primer on with an inline. Also if you don' t have the sabots in a speed losder then you essentially have to load two projectiles instead of one lead bullet. Much slower.

Jorgy, One more thing to add to Colorado law concerning muzzleloading rifles is that you can not use pelletized powder, it must be in powder form. Nor can you use smokeless powder (Savage). The bullets also have to be full bore and can be a maximum length of twice the diameter.

A thought on shooting an elk at 200 yards with a ML. Very few muzzleloaders can get a bullet up to 2000 fps. and when they do it is with a 150 grain charge, a very long barrel, and a very light bullet. Not something I would want to use on a 700 pound elk at 75 yards much less 200 yards. By the time it gets there all of that speed has gone by by and your energy level has done the same. With the slow speeds ML' s generate it is far better to use a projectile that is heavy enough to deliver some punch and use some common sence with the range.