The solo moose flip for boning is a bit of an olympic event...bring a good quantity of rope to tie off the back leg while you raise the front leg and vice-versa. They don't flip easy with the headgear still attached, either. I saw-cut the skullcap off but that's its own chore. Some sever the head but the head is huge. Good to have options.
I'd say a 130lb bone-in hind is on the heavy end of normal but I'm sure that's been exceeded somewhere by someone sometime and therefore the 170lb hindquarter is the fabled norm. I only weighed one..it was just over 120lb in my garage and came off a 56" bull. The regulation says that meat of the quarters must remain on the bones, but it makes no distinction about how many joints need to remain assembled. If a hind is too heavy, cut it apart at the knee. I never had to go there.
Take your time and don't get hurt. I wouldn't bother trying to cover every contingency...you can cover a lot of potential problems with some extra rope and gamebags, and a tarp. Don't think about every pulley and winch combo needed to extract a moose from the hip-deep mess you shot him in, rather think about how you plan to hang and secure the meat for the balance of the trip, because that's a real job.
Knife-wise I've skinned and boned an entire bull using various knives but it's nice to have a knife with a meaningfully stiff blade and full handle for various things...I'll call that a "hunting knife" for purpose of this discussion. Havalon + scalpel blades didn't do well for me when slitting skin along the neck and backline, but a 3" blade of decent steel on a decent handle made it easy...I found a little bit of knife push and leverage to be useful. I'm sure some have boned the whole thing with a havalon scalpel but that's not my experience. I'd feel well equipped with a victorinox and small sharpener for boning and a "hunting knife" for skinning. I hunted with a guy who brought a couple of fixed-blade buck knives with blades between 5" and 6" long...this was a river hunt so I had a lansky with and I spent two evenings with coarse stones putting a usable edge on one of those, and it was still too big to be really useful compared to a 3" or so. JMO.
I've shot 2 moose in a 50" or better area which I eyeballed width using the 10" to outside of eyeballs rule of thumb...one was 54 and the other 58, and I was 95% certain on both of them. If you're going to test that theory to a knife edge using optics and hashes, well, good luck. I doubt you'd get hammered on a 49" bull with tall wide palms and heavy bases, but that might not be the case with a spindly 48". I don't speak for enforcement but the one time I was checked was on the 54 and he didn't even bother with a tape measure.
I never hunted moose out of a "spot" like a destination airstrip so I always aimed to keep it light and lean. It's a lot easier to pack up and walk or float away with a small camp than a large one. The one big "float trip" I did, I brought my 4-man tipi with stove (which we fired once), my partner had a north face 4-season 4-man as backup. We put up the north face only once, more to see what it looked like than anything as it was new to him. Tiny door and tiny space compared to the tipi, and weighed about 8 times as much. But reassuring to have with. The other pair on the hunt had a heavy 4-season also. I was always packed and ready to float well ahead of the others. Logistics will dictate how carried away to get with shelter. Tipis are great for space and waiting out rain, less so for hurricanes.
