An interesting topic.
Personally, unless I'm hunting with them, I don't really care how accurate the average hunter is.
For me, long-range shooting for me is only a means to an end. Banging steel is fun, but what what really makes me smile is shooting at an animal with confidence and I mean CONFIDENCE. I will be the first to admit I was a horrible (perhaps worse than average) hunter in my youth. Take a hopped up kid, give him an adult-size gun with adult-size recoil, point him at a deer, scream and shout at him to SHOOOOOOOOT, and what sort of groups do you think I was getting? I probably wounded and lost as many as I brought home. Strange how so few people admit ever having done this.
After one particularly bothersome experience I decided to either learn to do it right or stop hunting. I spent my mid-twenties to mid-thirties away from hunting, slaving away at work. When I emerged from that self imposed prison, I started shooting. A lot. I eventually learned to shoot my .300 Wby well, but it took a few thousand rounds, a new barrel, and a shoulder injection to actually master it. Then I discovered that little itty-bitty guns (.308 Win or .260 Rem) killed stuff just fine when you could put the bullet in the right place.
I totally agree about muzzle blast being more bothersome than recoil to the accuracy of most shooters. That's why I absolutely can't stand muzzle breaks. I've lost almost all high-frequency hearing in my left ear from this hobby. Give me a suppressor any day of the week. I feel bad for those who can't own them.
I can almost always put a cold first shot on steel these days at 600 yards and most of the time at 700 yards. It gets more difficult beyond that. There are people here who can easily shoot small groups at 1000 yards and my hat is off to them. Without exception they've paid the price to learn the craft. My comfort level on game depends on the animal and the situation, but I'm sometimes confident out to 500 or 600 yards. I passed a monster mulie a couple of years ago that I probably could have killed...... but that's how it goes.
Real-world results say it all. Since I started figuring this stuff out, I wounded and lost a waterbuck at about 300 yards. My notes say that was 26 critters ago, not counting 'yotes and 'chucks. In that time there were 6 over 500 yards, all within the last 4 years. I've also started hunting dangerous game, and I'll just make the comment that being able to precisely place one bullet from a .416 Rigby in the exact right spot at 40 yards from high sticks in field conditions requires just as much skill and practice as plunking steel at 800 yards off the bench. It's a whole lot more important too.