From about 1959 until I had to stop eating fried fish fillets you would have found me easing along with up to two stringers of bass, one on each side of the boat, my objective to always harvest my limit. I often had to keep using a stringer even after owning a livewell that couldn't hold ten big bass. I never met another fisherman on Lake Ouachita that released eatin' sized bass or any other species worth eatin' until big name tournaments began there.
Slowly some anglers began leaving some or most of their bass, hauling chests of crappie or gills home instead, and lately trying a striper. My circle has tried replacing some bass with stripers for eating, but that red meat is foul to most everyone, and even when all of it is removed it has a very strong kerosene odor while cooking and just isn't eaten up off any fish fry tables around here. Hosts have learned to warn guests with a sign labeling a platter as "striper". We've tried soaking it overnight in tomato juice, in milk, buttermilk, the works. But us Arkies tend not to like eating fishy tasting fish. Even local walleye is too strong for lots of folks. It's bass, crappie, bluegills, or steak.
Today there are still a large number of the old gang not influenced by C&R thinking, having no respect for Ray Scott's decisions, mostly just aware we have a lot of new retirees from all over the nation bringing that idea here. None of the above has proved out to be helping or hurting the fishery.
For now I keep whatever bass or other mild tasting species that my wife and I can consume in a week at a time, choosing smaller fish that when baked or broiled are not strongly "fishy" in taste. I'll keep larger fish if they get badly damaged from catching. The largemouths here, under about 4#, have a very clean and sweet flavor similar to crappie, both a little less tasty than walleyes here.
There are 7 Corps-maintained fish cleaning stations around the lake, each with numerous 50 gallon carcass cans, plus an electric grinder with water and septic systems for small fish parts and blood. Dedicated trash trucks make the rounds daily removing fish debris too big to be ground up. That's evidence of a huge harvest rate that just doesn't stop. What the C&R anglers release are simply reserved for more folks that harvest, so at least around here it seems pointless to assume releasing a bass will ensure someone else will C&R it.
None of the above is meant to disparage C&R, which might be the only solution for a lake with poor nutrition or other factors working against a good support of large bass.
Jim