alt Hacker NewsI mean, what exactly are phrases like "strictly limited in population viability" and "never going to see a massive population" euphemisms for, exactly? High mortality, intense resource competition and survival of the fittest. Not what we normally associate with "exceptionally high standards of life". The higher the standard of life, the more procreation happens, the more demand there is for a constant supply of resources, and then starvation and warfare turns that supposedly noble savage into quite a vicious competitor.
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There are no euphemisms. The issue I think you're having is viewing things in a an artificially binary fashion. In reality it's all a lot fuzzier. If you don't have enough resources in one area it doesn't mean everybody just starves, it instead means you work a bit more, or just make do with a bit less. And that creates a voluntary pressure against fertility. Nature even has relatively tame 'stop-loss' measures here that further reinforce this like the fact that malnutrition directly reduces fertility. So if we graph population vs time, there's going to be a trend, but it'll look a lot like a relatively low amplitude sine wave. You'd only see sharps shifts after something like a plague.
Studies show a chaotic predator/prey relationship over time. When the ratio is small, it's fat times for the predators, and the predator population soars. Then they overhunt, and the prey diminishes, and the predator population crashes.
It's not stable.