One of the last times I hunted LBL, I hiked 3-4 miles back to where I was hunting from camp. On 3 hunts, I saw 0 deer. My dad was having some real back issues and could barely get his boots on, much less walk (bent over -looked like he was looking for pennies on the ground). We set him up with a fold out chair and he went off within eyesight from camp (50 yards) and saw dozens of deer.
Let me add a bit to your LBL observations: What you experienced may have become more the norm.
You see, almost no where within LBL is any area farther than 1 mile from any road you can easily drive and park a car. Also, almost none of the terrain is very challenging to a young hunter in good shape. This may be very unlike many large public hunting areas such as the Cherokee National Forest, where roads can be many miles apart and the terrain particularly challenging.
Consequently, many LBL hunters tend to study maps, look for those most "remote" areas, (good luck at finding
ANY more than 1.25 miles from a parkable road), then the majority of them make bee lines to those same areas. You will often find hunters coming in from 4 different directions, 4 different roads, all hunting within or nearly within eyesight of each other, yet they left behind thousands of acres virtually "unhunted".
In the case of your dad's experience, it may be the deer were not there the day before the quota hunt. It's just that the deer quickly gravitate to those areas they are least disturbed, and on those quota hunts,
often,
the most disturbed areas are those of the longest walks from from you choose to park.
That said, some of those more remote areas may in fact display more deer sign, have more deer much of the time or the year, than many areas very closer to roads. But as soon as the "scouters" and "hunters" begin scouting and hunting
ANY areas, the deer simply
"move over", often only choosing to spend much of each day a couple hundred yards from where they had, seeming to enjoy watching the parade of hunters.
The deer are often patterning the hunters more than the hunters are patterning the deer.