....Why don't we pay the few remaining oystermen to not catch oysters for a few years and let the oyster population recover. ....
The oyster population will never recover in the Bay. Harvesting oysters heavily, and never returning the shells to the bay destroyed the bars that new spat needs to grow on. That's my understanding asking these same questions to a buddy of mine who studied oyster ecology in grad school and now works for DNR on exactly this issue. You can put all the spat you want in the bay, and if they don't have shells to grow on, then nothing happens. Oyster shells develop over many generations, and when we started using them to pave roads, we sealed their fate. even today, recovery of harvested shells from restaurants, etc, is practically nil.
Basically everything that is done now is intended to preserve what we have as I understand it. About the only way you could really change it would be to figure out how to make a very cheap synthetic oyster shell.