Anthony, at the moment, I'm just informing myself. I will take no shot beyond 200 yards, unless I have a rest (mechanical, or a well-settled sandbag on a well-placed stump) and a deer that stands still for a silhouette portrait. In that case, I might reach out to 300 - if I'm holding a sight picture well, and I like the picture. As a leg amputee, I'm not climbing trees, or stalking, or going more then a couple of hundred yards from where the horse or ATV drops me off. Neither can I track a wounded animal. More then most hunters, if I do this, I need to set myself up to reliably get that bang/flop.
The best way to deal with a deer's sensitive nose is to be somewhere with some fairly long sight lines, probably farm country or former farm country. That dictates a rifle that's useful out to my 300 yard maximum, and it dictates a scope (so do my eyeballs.)
The K-31 sounds like the ideal poor man's route to an accurate .30 rifle, certainly enough so for the kind of deer hunting I have in mind, and heavy enough that recoil shouldn't be a problem for practice - especially once I've started doing moderate handloads, another new hobby to get into. So ..... right now ...... my thoughts are: a K-31, some Prvi Partizan ammuntion to get started and provide Boxer-primed brass for reloading, one of Darryl's clamp-on mounts, and a scope. A VX-II is the baseline purchase. A good pair of binoculars to monitor my surroundings, orange blaze camo for some idiotproofing, and lots of caution in taking the shot. I can sit quietly for awhile, say, from mid-afternoon to the following dawn. Bang/flop.
I have some experience with cameras. I can see advantages to a large objective that haven't been mentioned in this thread or other threads. F'instance, those yellow Alumina filters that Leopold sells for its' scopes? You can sharpen contrast with a filter that way, but the filter will significantly reduce light reaching the eye, enough to make a difference in marginal lighting. Add the filter to better penetrate haze or dust, or add a grey filter if you're overlooking a lot of snow, or sand. A big enough objective makes the light loss irrelevant. Putting the filter on the scope, as opposed to wearing tinted glasses, means the filter'll be under the lens hood, where it should be to avoid complicating vision with reflections.
The Leopold VX-L would be perfect. It's too expensive to buy if you don't know you need it, but I doubt Leopold can patent the idea of a notched lens. The day it first hit the market, optical engineers at every other scopemaker in the world looked at each other and said "why didn't we think of that? ... it's so OBVIOUS ... now let's do it." Leopold's methods for securing a notched objective group in the lens tube may be proprietary and protectable, but the basic design idea is not. Within a couple of years there will be several different notched-lens scopes on the market, and most of them made with cheap, highly skilled Chinese labor. So, for now, Darryl's mount on a K-31 with a midrange Leopold, VX-II, that I'll purchase used. If I need more then that, I have time to wait.
I'm sure most guys here who hunt will be able to think of times and places where they had to decide to forgo a shot that they'd like to have taken. These are just my notions for how to deal with the problem.