I am a co-owner of a four acre pond with five other landowners. I am the only one who fishes it excepting one high school kid who lives a couple of houses from me. The pond rules are C&R. I don't bother fishing it until summer so it has no pressure during the spawn. Some years there are as many as a dozen successful beds with resulting fry balls. Some other years only a few. It doesn't seem to matter though, by the Fall the number of one inch bass fry is always about the same. Same with the bluegill population. I used to have huge channel catfish which over the years have died off or been eaten by otters. Now there are a bit more bass and bluegill but not much more. My bass and bluegill are not stocked piled. Good distribution of year class fish.
So how many spawning beds and how successful they are doesn't seem to matter. Food is not an issue either since I have a healthy population of alewife herring. At this time of year they are everywhere on the surface jumping for flies and I see entire schools swim by the raft so the bass are very healthy eating bluegills and herring.
Our Inland Fisheries dept. feels that closing the season for the spawn does not increase year class recruitment so our lakes are open excepting the first two weeks of April for those trophy trout lakes and March for non-trophy trout lakes like Ball Pond. So far it is statistically true.
Where the balance is affected is the undue pressure we get from all of the other states running their bass tournaments over here while their seasons are closed. But Candlewood seems to still fish well especially for smallies. So I don't expect anything to change. We certainly don't have any more wiggle room to become more liberal with our regulations.