Not criticizing this thought, but my personal paradigm has shifted somewhat from "killing a buck" each year to "killing a deer" each year.
The other family members who only hunt 5-7 days spend as much money managing the property as I do (some, more). I wouldn't want to take away from the thrill of the realist chance of killing a buck each year. And they are
absolutely thrilled with that 85-95 class 2 1/2 year-old 8-pointer. More power to them. In addition, because of our unique situation, what we kill one year has little relevance to what is on the property the next. If killing those 2 1/2s was harming the buck age structure, we might reevaluate, but to date, it's not.
Once we went to passing on all yearling bucks, our age structure rose until it "maxed out" around 2003. Since then, it has stayed basically the same no matter what we kill. Below is a graph if our buck age structure 2003 to the present. I have it graphed on a 3-year running mean to take out the annual fluctuations due to small sample size. This statistical technique displays the true trends. Notice the trend - a flatline. Now not all properties will work this way. I can show graphs from other properties where it's very apparent what they kill matters! My property - being primarily transient deer - is somewhat unique.