The problem, deaddeer is that you are so bent on immediately discrediting Gary Alt. You continue to spew carefully chosen numbers and statistics that are only part of a very big, very complex picture.
You remind me of the guy who jumps up 1/4 of the way through a mystery movie and screams "the butler did it!" The one thing I heard over and over from Gary Alt was that this wasn't going to get fixed quickly and that it was quite likely that they would make mistakes along the way. I don't know, and neither do you, why the 2.5 year old buck kill this year didn't exactly bring the buck harvest back to 100% of post AR levels but I have a few educated guesses as to what MIGHT have been a factor

2.5 year old bucks are EXPONENTIALLY harder to kill than 1.5's

Weather on the biggest killing days hampered the hunters (we have years of data to back that up)

Hunter numbers keep dropping slightly each year (fact) and far fewer seem to travel to the big woods and/or spend as many days hunting as they used to (just my opinion based on personal experience)

The GPS studies indicated that hunting pressure is VERY light after the first day and most hunters today don't get far from the road, don't hunt where its steep, and don't hunt where it's thick. This is 2004 not 1984

Maybe none of the above made a significant difference, maybe one of them made all the difference. The point is that it's simply too early to tell.

When Gary Alt took over management of our bears, success wasn't immediate. He didn't start out as a bear expert but he became one.

He started this telling us that he wasn't an expert on Pennsylvania deer, yet. What he has is the training and ability to make changes based on good science, evaluate their effects, modify, and adapt till he gets it right.

Is he right all the time? NO will he make more mistakes? YES
Do I agree with everything he's done? NO Is there someone who has a better chance to become an expert on Pa deer management and making things better than they are now over time than Gary Alt? Maybe, but who?

Here's a bit of information for you experts out there that say the excessive doe tags are wiping out the big woods deer herd. The fawn study showed out of 228 fawns captured and collared only 7 were killed by hunters through the. 9 were killed by cars. 90 died of natural causes including predation. 53 of the 90 were killed by predators. I'm not going to draw a conclusion based on this one little fact (cause its a small part of the big picture) but it does raise the question that maybe it's not hunting pressure to blame for the fact that we see less deer in the big woods.

Deaddeer, I know you care a great deal about these issues and obviously spend a lot of time following and studying them. Why not relax a bit and give the qualified people the chance to do their jobs? It will take a little time.