I would agree, Steens (and most units for that matter) need help. Probably a tag numbers cut would be a good place to start (and eliminate antlerless tags altogether) and then some point limitations (3 point or better, 4 point or better) would be great. If guys have a tag that says visible antler, they will (like I did) take a small one rather than leave empty handed. Point restriction would eliminate that issue. Its a very complex problem though with factors like predators, poaching, high legal harvest, weather, etc, etc. and they have all been talked about over and over on MM. It takes money to fix these things and there is only going to be less money allocated to improving hunting, especially with all the money that has to be allocated to new factors like wolf management. How much money is being spent to monitor and track wolves, and investigate possible wolf predation on livestock, investigate suspicious wolf deaths, etc? And ODFW is not magically getting more money to deal with that, they have to take money that would have gone to help other wildlife and devote it to the wolves.
As the can gets kicked down the road for the mule deer, it will take exponentially longer to fix. In the late 90's the signs were there that the deer were declining but it would have been like a 3 year fix if the issues would have been addressed then. In the mid 2000's it would have probably taken 6-8 years of work to help the deer population recover. With where we are at now, it's going to take a couple decades, millions of dollars and a lot of red tape to fix the problems that we have and eventually, we will get to a tipping point and it will be too late, the endangered species act will be the only way to save the deer. Maybe I'm overstating it but I feel like that is a pretty accurate picture of where we are at with mule deer in Oregon.