Nobody asked for my personal perspective, and I'll admit, I haven't read all of the 12 pages to this point, only a few random posts scattered throughout the last 9 after reading the first few pages, but...
I shot Service Rifle in the late 1990's and early 2000's as a teen, and then also in the early 2000's, I started shooting Smallbore 3 position rimfire under the Military Science Building at K-State - because it was there. Through these games, I met a few guys who were shooting benchrest and F-Class within an hour's drive from school, so I rebarreled a Rem 700 and went and tried it out. About the same time, 3 Gun was starting to surge and I was building AR's for competition shooters to fill the growing demand - so I shot some 3 Gun, and being a literal card carrying cowboy at the time, I put together a set of Cowboy Action Shooting firearms as well... my professional competitive career got in the way in the 20-teens, so I didn't shoot any kind of regular competition largely from 2008/2009 until I started shooting PRS in 2017, now I'm shooting PRS and ELR matches monthly.
There were no "young shooters" in Service Rifle at our club, and I only saw folks my age when military shooting team dudes showed up. There were no "young shooters" in F-class or BR, most guys were around twice my age at the time, and I scantly remember many dudes even in their 40's on those lines. Cowboy Action games did have a few grandpa's bringing their grand kids around, but most were sub-18yoa, and then a big gap to the top end of the next generation - so I was the only guy in 20's or even 30's there too. The only place where I saw other "young shooters" was in 3 Gun. Individually - Shooting Service rifle was BORING. Period. I quickly hit a plateau where a little practice gained a lot of skill, but then gaining a little more skill was going to take a LOT more practice. I knew from shooting other disciplines that the standard of precision in SR wasn't the bleeding edge of the spear, and I felt immediately silly living in the "well it's not really a small group, but it's a small group for standing, off-hand." Shooting BR and F-class was a rude awakening of another kind - I hit the same plateau, and realized that there were really just a handful of dudes who were remotely in the hunt to win on any given weekend, and the level of practice and preparation to get there was outside of my financial capabilities at the time - I'll come back to this... Shooting 3 Gun, everybody was really friendly at my first few matches, but once I climbed to the middle of the pack, as a new guy, a young guy, I was radioactive. The same happened at Cowboy Action Shooting matches - I shot my first match with just a Marlin 1894 and Ruger Super Blackhawk in 44mag, everything else was borrowed, but after I picked up a set of my own gear and started beating most of the regular shooters - finishing mid-pack, but simply being faster and more physically capable than the fleet of greytops against whom I was competing - again, I was radioactive. I could also see the podium on the distant horizon, with the same realization that my learning curve had plateaued, and climbing every percentile higher in the rankings was going to cost more and more in terms of tedium... I was making a living at the time as a professional athlete, so I stopped competitive shooting for a while and focused on those other pursuits...
Circling back to F-Class & BR, and the change in my financial capabilities: Taking that ~8yr hiatus, I really only came back to shooting competitively because I have access to so many options for PRS competitions near my home. I noticed in 2016 that there was a local PRS club near me, hosting monthly matches at 4 different ranges from 45min to 2hours from my house. So I bought a $1600 rifle and a $900 scope and started shooting. Over the last 8 seasons, I've won parts to build 3 more PRS match rifles. I also happen to live only an hour from one of the pre-eminent ELR competition ranges in the country, so last year I built, out of pocket, a Heavy Division rifle - and started making noise to the tune of $6.37 per shot, plus match fees... I had to buy an entirely new reloading system, as none of my other gear was capable of producing such large ammo. And after a single season, I picked up parts for half of a Light Division rifle, and all of my bullets I need for next season. I typically finish in the 50th to 20th percentile in Pro Series PRS matches - not really a talented shooter, just kinda handy behind the gun, but I RARELY come home with a prize worth less than my entry fees + ammo. I'm much more willing to dip into my pocket to go out and shoot in a game where I have regular opportunity to compete without driving 6 hours every match, and where match directors are doing the leg work to get sponsors and donors to fill a prize table which can help keep me from dipping so deeply into my pocket to keep playing.
As a guy who helps recruit new shooters to the game of PRS, I will mention also that most shooters see it as a more practical test of marksmanship than other games - without the "race" feeling of action shooting like 3 gun. Plus, PRS has variable success within its format - if a guy can lay down and hit big targets, simply by knowing their MV and BC, they can hit 8-10 out of 10 on a 600-1000 yard troop line stage, and they feel a lot better about their day, even if they didn't hit ANY targets off of the rooftop stage. I remember shooting one of my first BR matches and my aggregate was like 4-5 times larger than the winner's, a few groups which I knew were still better marksmanship than most humans on earth, but still a hundred miles away from success... When a new shooter comes out and shoots a 50% score (half of the winner's points), they can still point to 1 or 2 stages out of 10 where they felt they shot well, and point to the harder stages as obvious opportunities to improve. Not so uncommon in my own self-justification - I find myself satisfied by cleaning certain stages and write off the stages where I drop 5 or 6 points as "areas for practice," - whereas I could be harder on myself to acknowledge, I'm only shooting ~70% of the winner's points on average.
Admittedly, also, the PRS is struggling to regain its growth rate which we enjoyed before Covid, before the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the corresponding inflation and component shortages thereafter. But the PRS has a format which enables far more "partial success," and has a market platform where a mass produced "Production Rifle" and factory ammo can be used to win any match in the country - which simply doesn't translate to any other precision shooting sport.
