Its all about the ecology pyramid you'll have learned about in middle/high school. If you let nature find its balance, this is what you get:
For a lake, the primary producers are your aquatic vegetation, algae, and anything else that can take water, nutrients, and sunlight to grow and make energy. You then need organisms like insects and crustaceans to convert that plant energy into animals. From there small fish like minnows eat the insects, bigger fish eat the minnows, and predators eat the bigger fish. Proportionally, this is how it has to work. In absolute terms if you want that 0.1% of third level consumers (i.e. bass assuming you have pike or musky around) to have a large population then you need to have a large enough base to support it. People always talk about baitfish but baitfish only survive if there are enough nutrients in the water in the first place converted by enough producers. Farm ponds are a good example. For their size, most farm ponds shouldn't have fish in the multiple pounds range and yet I've witnessed multiple 8+ lb fish coming from 1-3 acre PA farm ponds. Nutrients = a large fish population.
All of the above is for a system in equilibrium. If someone stocks 10k lb of baitfish every year, you don't need the producers as much (until stocking stops). If someone stocks 10k 8" bass then you add a demand higher up the chain which will either feed the apex predators or cause a crash of the secondary consumers. When the state does fish surveys, they are trying to determine how steep the sides are on the pyramid to know what the balance is and why. A lake with a bigger top layer than the layer below can support will mean that top layer has smaller or less healthy individuals which is what you could be seeing.
Or, you just don't know how to catch big bass. ?
