There's no reason you couldn't use a button release, kisser, or sights with a long bow - you'd just have to use different materials for the construction to handle that kind of thing.

As for the drawing and whatnot, again, of course they were "deformed" with wacky musculature - no two ways about it, again though battle archery they were firing with the purpose about equivalent to modern day "artillery" or "firing for effect" rather than acting like a modern day rifleman, picking out targets and trying to nail them. This is not to say that I don't think they were very accurate, certainly they were.

Incidentally, with a button release, you're actually pulling back to your ear - the extension of the string capture component of your release is why you pull the string only to your lip, but your hand is back at your ear. Fortunately with a compound, that last bit of draw is under much less weight than the rest of the draw though so it's not like the added length is taxing. When I release my bow the most proximal knuckle of my index (trigger) finger is anchored under my ear.

I am very much interested in learning traditional archery and how to be a so-called "instinctive" shooter, but it is cost and time prohibitive to be honest and with all my other shooting sports, I'm lucky if I get in an hour a week with my compound bow during the Spring, Summer, and Fall months.

My point wasn't to laugh at your post above mine by the way, I was laughing at people who don't really understand archery. Certainly the release is largely compensated for with typical compound bow setups, but you still need to draw the bow properly and quietly if you're hunting, and you still need to be able to aim it and hold it on target and gauge distances properly. In truth, it's distance judgement that separates good "hunting" archers from just average ones. You don't always have the time to take a laser range on your target and you need to be able to gauge that, and that's a tall order with the way your point of impact can change from say, 30 to 40 yards with even the most powerful compound bows.

 

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I should probably have qualified that for Hunting I completely understand the use of a compound bow, you want to be accurate and silent. I am really talking about archery as a sport/hobby/passtime. As a traditional archer shooting with Compound or even modern Recurve archers either in the field or target shooting is tedious, a group of three of us shooting traditional bows might spend 2 minutes at a field target before moving to the next in the shoot, if a group of 3 compound or recurve archers are ahead of us we may have to wait 2 minutes for each archer when we inevitably catch up with them.

Target archery competitions with mixed classes are equally frustrating, 50 of you move up to the shoot line 30-40 seconds later 20 traditional archers are all standing silently on the line waiting for the guys around them to release not moving so as not to disturb them while the hold, hold, hold, let down, pull, hold, hold, hold RELEASE! then the guy on your left is making his next shot and your still stuck waiting.

I think differentiating between Hunting and Archery as a sport are important in this case.

 

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