Not talking trot lines with a recreational, not survival, fishing kit. What we are talking about is getting to fishing, and hopfully catching, quickly and without the need to find bait. It's about conserving the most limited recreational resource - time.

My experience is that if you get almost any offering in front of a fish, you stand a decent chance of catching it. it's playing the odds. More casts, more fish. More locations fished, more fish. Hard lures do this very well.

Of course, my opinion is based on just my own experience in recreational and tournament fishing for several decades.