Why do serious muskie anglers obsess over hooks?
Because the hook is the only part of the system that actually touches the fish, and it is being asked to penetrate bone-hard jaw material through the padding of a giant bait. The standard upgrades: replace stock trebles with premium 3X–4X-strong hooks that will not open against a locked drag, keep points sticky-sharp with a file and test them on a thumbnail daily, and favor patterns with enough gap that a bait body cannot shield the point. There is also a release angle — hooks strong enough to hold are also hard to remove, which is exactly why the muskie toolkit includes long pliers and a hook cutter: cutting a deep hook and leaving fragments beats a five-minute extraction every time.
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This answer is one piece of a longer lesson — setups, diagrams and the reasoning behind it.
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