Wow, after reading your guys scout experiences it sounds like it sucks. My scout master was cool stuff, he even took us to his personal land to camp out and such. We were aloud to take whatever could fit in a 5 gallon bucket, the sleeping bag was excluded because that would take almost all of it up.
Although we had these rules on items:
-No electronics such as phones and such. Well thats about it, you can only have it incase of emergencies (not like it works in the woods anyways lol)