You are not being too pessimistic. The situation you describe is where we are headed. No one wants to hear this, but the answer is lawyers. Sport anglers are absolutely horrible at hiring/using lawyers. Frankly, I think sport anglers don't know much about lawyers (even though there are a few on PP), don't have any idea what they cost, and are generally suspicious of them. That needs to change, quickly.

The recreational angling community got lucky when the commercial crab industry hired less than outstanding counsel to represent them in their appeals of the crab change regulations favoring recs a couple years ago. The AG's office was able to prevail against them.

That is unlikely to happen again this time. The larger tribes are much better financed, more sophisticated and, apparently, have been thinking about this for a long time. I guess it's fine that folks will protest NOAA, but realistically that is not what is needed. The folks at LLTK, CCA, PSA should be raising a pooled litigation fund from wealthy supporters and seeking to hire a couple passionate attorneys or firms to aggressively represent sport-fishing interests with the ESA/Treaty issue and other NOF fallout. Absent that, the recreational community is really just watching, and this isn't going to end well.