Chad, Chad, Chad, that you could so completely misunderstand what it is that makes a hunt successful probably is due to your bias that comes from years of experience precision loading ammunition to give peak performance for shooters (including hunters). After all, how many times has it been said on this very forum that hunting isn't about killing. It is about getting out into the woods and communing with nature, re-establishing contact with God and his majesty, and the experience of being with friends. Holy cow, I don't even know why people bother to take rifles or weapons hunting anymore.
But, I guess you gotta take a gun along to call it hunting. Otherwise, it is just camping or hiking.
I hunt with a gentleman, occasionally, that worked as a gunsmith for 10 years after moving to Texas from Washington state where he guided hunts. He has recounted to me numerous stories about with people about which you are speaking. He had a guy show up for a bear hunt from out of state. The man brought 3 rounds of ammunition with him of some unique mongo load that you can't get at the local hardware store in backwoods Washington. Danged if he didn't drop his rifle on the first day of the hunt, knocking his scope akilter. No problem my buddy said, we will just get you rezeroed and you will be good to go, but the guy only brought 3 rounds. Why did he only bring 3 rounds? Because he wasn't going to need more than 3 to kill a bear. Why would he need to bring more ammo than what was needed for the task? That would be ridiculous, right? People really do have that sort of mentality and lack of foresight or consideration.
I had commented to my buddy about the craziness at the local range on the weekend just before deer season. I could not believe that I saw guys use paper plates as targets, put them at 50 yards, and if they could get 3 or 5 shots anywhere on the plate at that distance, they were good-to-go. I was amazed to see the guy next to me shooting ball ammo and getting a 7" group at 50 yards with a scoped rifle and proclaiming he was good to go for next weekend. So the guy was checking zero with ammo that he wasn't going to be hunting with and was satisfied with a 14 MOA group. I checked his plate after he left. He had 5 shots, vertically strung, mostly about 3" left of center. I have since been told that a paper plate is the same size as the kill zone on the deer, so why waist the money on getting a proper zero if you can hit a paper plate-sized target? I sincerely hope he was hunting over a feeding that was much closer than 50 yards.
As a gunsmith, my buddy replied how he would regularly mount scopes on rifles for customers and bore sight them. They had so much negative feedback from customers, they started handing out a sheet of instructions with the same information they went over with customers verbally about their bore sighted rifles. He would explain that the customer needed to go to the range and properly and fully zero the rifle with the ammunition he planned on hunting with, that the bore zero would probably get him on paper at 50 yards but that was about it. The customers would leave and then come back after the opening of deer season, proclaiming their new scope was defective or that my buddy had not zeroed the gun properly for them and that he had ruined their hunt as a result. It was always some sort of trophy buck, once in a lifetime sort of event that he apparently screwed up for the customer. He would ask the customer about the customer's experience at the range to zero the rifle and virtually every time, either the customer didn't go to the range to zero the rifle properly, or didn't attempt to zero it with the hunting ammo used (because that is too expensive to waste on zeroing). After all, ammo is ammo, right? If you zero for one, you zero for all.
Now there is nothing wrong with enjoying God's majesty, time with friends, and just getting out and about in the great outdoors. But if I have the opportunity to pull the trigger, by golly, I want the animal at which I am aiming to be dead and one of the best ways to help assure that happens is to have a properly zeroed rifle. I will pre-zero with cheap ammo and then refine my zero with the ammo I am going to be using for hunting. In the grand scheme, even if using expensive ammo, the cost of zeroing relative to the other expenses of hunting are fairly inconsequential, but some people are just too cheap, too lazy, or too determinately ignorant.