Deer do use beach nuts. I've not seen deer eating hickory at my place. I think it is due to the thickness of the shell. Squirrels will eat them, especially when acorns are scarce.
As for what to do next. We have plenty of oaks, so I've only grown DCOs in the oak family. Most of what I've grown have been chestnuts. I don't know if this applies to your oaks or not as some don't need stratification and some do, but here is what we found with chestnuts. Another guy and I started a boat load of chestnuts one year. We used pretty much the same techniques. We recorded our results and compared them. The only significant difference was stratification time. He used 90 days and I used 60. He got significantly better germination rates than I did. If you poke around on this forum and do a search, you can probably find that thread. As I recall, I even posted a graph that showed when each of my nuts showed top growth after they were removed from cold stratification and planted in Rootmaker 18s. We both started our nuts indoors under lights using the rootmaker system.
Thanks,
Jack