Hoochie mamas are worthless for elk hunting in earnest.
The call is waaay to short to sound realistic and you can only make 3 different elks sounding sounds.(that sounds weird)
A mouth call is a much better way to go.

Apparently the elk where I hunt are different than the elk where you hunt, because I have heard cows many MANY times sound pretty much exactly like the hoochie moma that I use, or your hoochie moma don't work right..

A Chirp Is short and should last about 1 Sec.
Which is what the HM call does.
But if you want an authentic estrus call it needs to be long and pleading or it sounds akward. But like you said mabye your elk are different.
Where do you Live?

i used one last year and it kicks A$$

That might be true but it is supposed to call in elk.
Its advertised as a "elk call" not a "a$$ kicker". :hit:

I hunt here in CO., and when we call elk we don't just use estrous sounds, hence the reason that I stated earlier in this post that we use the HM along WITH several other calls.
When you're around a heard of cows/calves, they're not all doing estrous chirps all the time, matter of fact, a relaxed herd will be making many different sounds as they communicate back and forth.
There are times that we will use estrous only, but we usually make it sound like there's more than one cow/calf when calling.
At times, we'll even have two guys bugling behind the shooter, one guy sounding like a rag horn and the other sounding like a mature growly old bull, mixed in with cow calls.