Muzzle loader hunter: we need a special season like bows for our primitive equipment.
State game boards: OK here's a premium week after bow before rifle.
Muzzle loader hunter 20 years later: here is my carbon stocked wonder gun that shots smokeless from rifle primers, with low drag jacketed bullets and a scope with accurate drops to 700.... it's "primitive"
State game boards: bans scopes
Muzzle loader hunters: but my poor eyesight and lombago...
Victims of their own innovation, with just a smidgen of slight of hand.
My rifle is radically different than 30 years ago, granted 30 years ago I was a small child... guess fair play I've significantly updated my red rider since I was 6.
The whole rational behind bows and muzzle loaders getting early seasons, special tags and times is to give them an advantage to offset the significant inefficiencies of primitive weapons. Eliminate those efficiencies and you eliminate the need for the special season. Most of those seasons were fought for by well meaning people packing hawkin style rifles fighting to maintain a tradition way of hunting. States responded with the special seasons, but many years later we've come to the point where regulators go "hey that's not why we give you special stuff". Probably the easiest way to do that was eliminate magnified optics.
Then we get to the good old fashioned red herring of "but but.... hypocrite ".
Rifle season is like open class, your only limited by your imagination, budget and some times a caliber minimum. It's been like that in most states for long before my time. It's open to any and all, even your "muzzle loader".
Except that's the backwards way of looking at it, if you want to limit effective range and make it more primitive then limit the rifle itself rather than removing the optic. I can take the Nightforce off my smokeless and put it on my flintlock shooting round balls but that doesn't make it a 700 yard rifle.
People moved into the muzzleloader season because it became more and more difficult to draw tags in rifle. However when you are forking over tens of thousands of dollar to go out west to hunt you are using every advantage you have to not come home empty handed and waste years of savings.
I understand it and my license costs me less than $100, the PA game commission limiting doe opportunity during rifle season is the primary reason that I switched from my flintlock to a smokeless. I needed something to more reliably take deer during the early muzzleloader season when they removed half our opportunities in rifle season.