I will disagree with you on this notion that Utah is not a state to apply to, unless you are going after the marque hunts. If you are going after the early rifle elk in San Juan or Henry Mountains rifle deer, then you might be in for the long haul.
You can hunt general deer every few years if you choose to. The pronghorn odds are not horrible. The Late Elk hunts are easier to draw and a tag can be gotten by someone that starts at ground 0 and does their homework within their lifetime. The LE deer is adding hunts into the mix with late ML hunts. The OIL hunts are just a raffle, but you can always get lucky.
I look at it like Nevada and Arizona. You can use opportunity deer hunts to make use of the license money along the way to an elk tag or OIL tag that you want to draw. The deer tags are not expensive either.