Of course they went from bad to worse. The S Tacoma fish were incubated and reared on warm water. Decades of selection enforced that. Then, off to the hinterlands and cold water.

If you look at the few places with complete run wild R/S you see that steelhead rarely have a 1:1 R/S for all first returns. They need repeats. Further, R/S increases with decreasing smolt age. Where I have a longer data set, an average smolt age of 1.5 got you and R/S of 1. Which is why hatchery runs worked for so long when there were decent marine survivals. Lose that, and you need a whole lot of repeats, which don't seem to happen when you kill spawn. I asked the Pacific Coast steelhead conference folks for any data to refute this view and none had it.

Another aspect of steelhead and hatchery programs, at least as it appeared at the Steelhead Conferences, was that the most successful programs were the largest; releases in the 100-200-and up K. Most programs now are tiny. Small programs are made up of few spawners.....
Which suggests to me that hatchery steelhead should be confined to a few "destroyed/compromised" systems like Cowlitz and Green with program release minimums of 250K, maybe go for 500K.