RR - You might consider that we "suck at it" because it's a lucky day when we're able to find elk placidly grazing in a meadow 200 yards away. In reality, I'd just as well try looking through a brick wall as set up high and hope a shootable bull walks through the handful of quarter-acre bogs, beaver meadows, or burns below me, whether they're 100 or 1000 yards away.

Competing in PR legs of multi-gun, I don't exactly view long-range shooting as boring. Quite the opposite. However, the ONLY big game in my neck of the woods (or plains) that lends itself to that kind of shooting is pronghorn. But, given the choice of shooting a goat at 800-plus with my PR (I've hit 10" plates cold bore at greater) or outwitting him with a stalk into handgun or bow range? To each his own.

Back to the OP. Now that you've calmed down a shade (wise choice, that edit you made), I hope that you're redefining your emphasis here. There are a LOT of calibers suitable for elk. The minimum short-action cartridge I'd consider suitable is the 7mm-08. The minimum long-action cartridge I'd consider suitable is the .270. The calibers I would suggest as MOST popular for elk are the 7mm Remington Magnum, the .30-06, and the .300 Winchester Magnum. Performance-wise, and from experience, the Weatherby Vanguard is very hard to beat for the money, and I'm hearing the Series II is an improvement over the original.

If you're planning a NM hunt, I'd do some work in Google Earth and see what kind of terrain and vegetation you may encounter or if you've booked a guide, talk to them about the kind of shooting to expect. Issuing a blanket of "500 yards" without any other justification ("my guide says to expect...") opens the door to make the wrong choice for the right conditions.

My own DEDICATED (I don't use it for anything else) elk rifle is a Wal-Mart Weatherby Vanguard in .300 Weatherby that I picked up new for less than $400 (they're a couple hundred more now, I think?) topped by a 3-9x40mm Leupold VXII. Total investment with Leupold mounts and rings is still less than $1000.

However, I probably have twice the investment I've made in a rifle and scope in QUALITY boots, QUALITY pack, and QUALITY compact spotting scope and tripod. And then there's the time spent conditioning.... Elk hunting is considerably more involved than the just rifle.