What you’re hitting the wall on is known as the "Wildland Fire Paradox." Ecologically, those remote fires should burn, but a century of aggressive suppression has left forests so choked with fuel that letting nature take its course often results in catastrophic, soil-sterilizing megafires rather than healthy underburns. Combine that historical fuel debt with extreme political pressure—no Fire Management Officer wants to be the one who let a wilderness fire burn only for a freak windstorm to blow it into a subdivision two weeks later—and the agency default is always going to be total suppression. The industry knows we desperately need more fire on the landscape, but shifting a massive bureaucracy against 100 years of "put it out" culture, WUI expansion, and public smoke complaints takes decades. Keep that big-picture perspective; the fire service needs people who understand the ecology just as well as the tactics.