Couple things come to mind. As long as we are willing to say "what he does is worse", nothing will get done.

Dams? Nope, it's the sea lions. Logging? No, it's the gill nets. Fishing? No, it's ocean mortality. And so on. There is so much blame that everybody can find somebody worse. And, until the worst is fixed I don't have to.

And, saving the fish, or any natural resource is going to cost each one of us some money or freedom. We have very convincingly shown, over the course of millenia, that we when we do whatever we want nature loses.

As to bait and the problems of. Can anybody out there tell me of a full access (not 25 miles back in a wilderness) fishery on salmonids that uses bait and has a robust population of naturally reproducing wild fish? Seems to me that the well know, popular, and intensively fished wild-stock fisheries have one thing in common. No bait.