I don’t hunt with them because I’m a veg, but I guess it’s nice to know that I could in the unlikely event that shit completely hit the fan in a way that necessitated that. It also just feels good to do something with my time that actually makes me feel human.
I’m sorry I don’t know what community to post this in. Feel free to correct me accordingly.
Try it! This is where most of us start: http://poorfolkbows.com/oak9.htm (100% big box hardware store materials, with the exception of the string, but some paracord can make an adequate placeholder until you can get a proper one). You can also do a lot with PVC pipes from the hardware store, but that's a whole side of things that I haven't gotten too involved with myself.
I'm sorry to hear about your declining eyesight. When I'm just tired and need to decompress, I get a lot of enjoyment out of just going out and spraying the target, without really paying much attention to how close my grouping is. Feels more like war archery, where you don't need to be dead accurate -- just accurate enough to turn an oncoming grunt into a pincushion. The high-weight war bows they used to use for that were really too powerful to shoot with the sort of laser accuracy that we like to imagine today anyway. English (bleh) war archers shot longbows that pulled at 80-150 lbs.
And yeah, even if dried properly, pine is a less-than-ideal bow wood. It's very soft and doesn't hold up very well under compression. A good, dense hard wood is generally what you'd want to go for. Breaking bows is how you learn though!
My understanding was that for war-bows they'd practice by putting a circle of rope or cloth a couple of yards across at a fixed distance, then the archers would try to put their arrows in to that circle. More like artillery than sniping. If you put enough arrows in to a dense mass of infantry or cavalry you're gonna get lucky enough of the time.