I personally love hunting Illinois and think its a great state to hunt in. You have to realize you live within 50 miles of a city of over 2 million people, there is no way to have enough land for everyone. Look at some of the bigger cities in the country and then look at how much public land they have near them, it isn't much.
Alot of the land that Mchenry has aquired that you speak of in is near subdivisions so there is no way that they can all have it open to hunting. Granted, I wish they did, but you have to realize that this isn't like a small town in rural america. There are anti hunters around here and we have to jump through hoops to hunt anywhere near the city and constantly deal with anti hunters.
It stinks that we don't have more public land but you have to realize that we live near one of the largest cities in North America, there is no way we can have enough land. We have to share this land with the non-hunting public so you can't open up all the land to hunters. There are people who like to photograph, take there dogs for walks, jog and they pay taxes too so we can't take all the land from them. Chain of Lakes is closed to the non hunting public October to January and thats a lot of land, so we get our turn there. Plus they have some great pheasant hunting as well.
I sure wish we had more public land and I've hunted a lot of public land but there just isn't enough land to go around. Land is expensive and the state can't afford to just keep buying it.
Try hunting farther south in Illinois, since there is less people there is a lot more land. Illinois had Shawnee National Forest, over 250,000 acres of public land. I hunted it last year for deer gun season and had a blast. There are some Giant Bucks down there on public land and saw a few harvested last year.
Hopefully you can find some spots near Mchenry county to hunt, there are some and after some research in Lake County and talking to some people I've found a good amount of spots to deer hunt. There there, you just have to keep your eyes open and ears to the ground. Good luck, hopefully it will all work out for you over there this season.