While that sounds good, the overwhelming experience with steelhead is that a single generation in the hatchery lowers the offspring's fitness in the wild. They come back, spawn, but produce less young and also lower the survival of the wild fish they mate with.

It might work, IF the number of hatchery-bred spawners is significantly less than the wilds (let wild genes dominate) and, IF the hatchery is for a fixed term so that you can get the population "bump" and then let nature take over. The All-H-Analyzer model, that looks at hatcheries, habitat, harvest, and hydro to size a hatchery program clearly shows this. What it also shows is that for recovery to work in the long term you have to depend on wild fish.

And managers of all stripes are like drug addicts. Give them a taste of harvesting at a hatchery rate and they can't stop themselves.... It allows one to not have to make difficult decisions like closing fisheries, not developing in floodplains, not logging every tree in a watershed, and not covering the lowlands in development.