Killing does only helps the buck quality if the deer don't have enough nutritious food. And a lack of food is much less common that most people seem to think now that most of the state is on a rotational pine harvesting cycle. Pines produce an enormous amount of deer browse throughout the cycle other than a few years in the middle where the canopy is shading the ground. It is now almost impossible to have more deer than the land can feed in a rotational pine plantation now that deer have natural predation from coyotes and disease. As long as you have plenty of food, killing does is only going to make you have less bucks, not more or higher quality bucks. The only way you get more quality and quantity of bucks is to shoot less bucks and let them age.

A ton of QDM followers mistakenly attribute the increased quantity of larger bucks they are seeing to their doe harvesting when in all reality it is because they are letting the bucks get older. Just because you let a buck walk doesn't mean you have to also shoot a doe. You may just need to have an empty freezer for a few years until you get more aged bucks in your herd.

There are some places that truly are overpopulated and need doe thinning, but like Matt Brock said, most people don't know enough about what they are doing to know when they need to thin a herd. And the result is that in places where every 100 or so acres is owned by different people, you end up with way too few deer because all it takes is one of those 6 property owners in that square mile to start killing too many does, and now the other 5 owners have to deal with the consequences of that. The one size fits all unlimited doe harvest for the state has been a disaster and you would think that after 25 years of it, the state would have enough evidence to know that it isn't working. We need to go back to the default rule of limited or no doe killing allowed and let the people who feel like they have an overpopulated herd apply for a doe permit like they used to.