Native fish programs have been tried in various places. There are a variety of problems.

Getting fish to yearling smolt, which is the most economical, requires rapid growth which in the hatchery generally means warmer water, warmer incubation and so on. All things that select for maladaptations in the wild.

Wild steelhead do smolt as age-1 but this is in high productivity situations. Also, age-1 smolts (whether hatchery or wild) will return earlier in the year than age-2. So there will be a temporal separation on returns.

Although winter steelhead arrive at the stream more mature than summers, they still need to mature. In the streams I worked on, the wild fish spawned January-June but most was in April and May. Spawn time has been shown to be an inherited characteristic too.

Certainly the use of local stocks is better than an imported stock if the goal is to minimize genetic damage. But, the accumulated evidence is that any time in a hatchery produces steelhead that are not as successful spawning in the wild. Steelhead are apparently very sensitive to the myriad of differences between a hatchery environment and the wild environment.

In my opinion, based on what I have seen over the years, if we want to have hatchery steelhead programs we should do them in systems where the wild fish are written off due to dams, habitat degradation, or short run (like the Lyre). Wild or hatchery but not both in the system.