Thanks for digging into this topic and also for the creative use of @penny4thoughts!

Sadly, I agree with you that the thylacine is almost certainly extinct now.  Sightings are one thing, but if the species still exists, you'd figure someone would have found a carcass or two sometime in the last 80+ years.

Still, the one video clip in the youtube video that you included sure looks like one.  I have never seen a fox that appears to move by hopping the way that animal does...  So, I guess there's a little bit of room to entertain a nagging doubt.

I was not previously aware of the points that you raise here.  [Everipedia](https://everipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine) confirms that the species was already gone from mainland Australia and relegated to the island of Tasmania by the time that the British arrived in Australia, so it seems that you're right about the species' difficulty at dealing with evolutionary competition.  In fact, it also mentions that factors contributing to extinction include habitat encroachment by humans and the introduction of dogs on the island of Tasmania.

The part about the government paying a bounty to kill the animals is really sad, and it reminds me of the American Bison.  Like the thylacine, there were many contributiong factors, but the final blow almost came when the Buffalo was driven to the brink of extinction by the US government in order to deprive the <i>plains Indians</i> of their primary food source during the so-called "Indian Wars" in the 1870s.