I'll pile on this a little, all of this is in my very fallible opinion.
All the pre-season sign is irrelevant after the first week or so of season on public land, and you are better off looking for habitat features, and hard to reach places. Pressure trumps just about everything else on public land. I am always going to different areas, usually I am executing plan X or Y as plans have to change on public, my strategy now is to look for terrain features more than anything.
For me its all about pinch points. I try to find obvious ones that are only water accessible on public land, if I can canoe in on the right wind and immediately get in a tree all the better. Even if I have to paddle a mile or more, and often in the dark, it keeps the a lot of other hunters away.
Those pinch points often don't have scrapes or scat as the deer are cruising between areas, so hunters pass them by even if they can get into those areas, because they are looking for the "fresh" sign. Those pinch points have trails that get walked on a lot, and can be hard to identify until the snow gives them away. I really pay attention to the wind and make sure I have a clearing or feature a deer won't cross on my downwind side.
I killed two bucks this year, one in MN, then a week later in WI, site unseen areas, but knew the landscape features to look for, paddled in, got up in my tree and am tagged out. I usually mark a bunch of pinch points in a target 25 mile area. Because I often go in blind, some are tougher to get to than I thought, so I will switch up the plan, or I get into the woods and its gonna be loud moving through, I may move onto the next pinch point I identified.
Both my bucks came in calm and cruising to other points, not even looking up in the trees because its not a place they have regular encounters. Plus pinch points are by nature narrow, so the deer can see everything, and feel like they can smell everything as well, until I send an arrow right through them.