I do this religiously and know many who do as well and its a thing. But most people cant shoot well enough to tell and or cant reload goof enough either or combination of the two. Now this is just my two cents do as you will but i do more shooting then most by a lot. And load work is something i offer to my customers when they get a gun. But ill say thid for something to think about A powder node will never move. Powder charge will. Powder charge and that node is not the same. Different lots ect and barrel erosion. Will change the speed which changes your node. Most people dont even know guns have multiple nodes. Me personally i load in the low node. Depending on temperature i pick which part i load in. But most guns have a very narrow high node. Now if your experienced enough to identify that node and know how to stay in it fine that works. But for me low node is always more accurate. When i do seating test i start in .009 increments and narrow it down. Most bergers have .006 window where they shoot much better then anywhere else. Me i go out and repeat every gun 3x and if itll do that 9/10 times itll do exactly that. Seating is just changing the harmonics of the barrel. Thats why a suppressor changes poi and why a tuner literally tunes. If it didnt matter those two things wouldnt change anything to a gun. Now this is just my two cents. You definitely dont need a .1 gun to go kill animals a .8 gun will do it just fine. If thats the accuracy goal i wouldnt do much at all for load work. Atleast with my guns that is. Most shoot .5 with anything down pipe.
I agree that I can anecdotally see this as well. I stopped arguing it a long time ago. It is easier to see a small improvement in a gun that shoots small. In most of my hunting guns, I shoot Hornady, as I like the terminal performance and cost. Most of them, even with top brass and barrels will do 3/4 -1moa for 20 shots at distance. In match guns, I'll use Berger or Sierra and Berger almost always shoots tighter than Sierra with the exception of one of the first lots of rebated boattail dtacs that shot as good as most lots of Berger.
The problem, for me, is that I would rather hunt/shoot than do load development. Once I think I have a powder node, I just shoot a couple 10 shot groups at the longest yardage I have access to. If I am sub 1 moa with a hunting gun or sub 1/2 moa with a match gun, I am finished. It is good enough. I have done seating depth testing and seen a pattern where the node was around .006. The load held for a lot of shots and was significantly better than the bad ones I threw out with testing.
With random dispersion , even a lot of the rounds of a 1.5 moa system hit close to the middle. That means it is easy for guys that have never shot a true sub half moa system to blame the misses on themselves. Once you shoot a sub half moa gun across several prs matches and compare it to the results of a 1 moa gun across several matches, it becomes apparent that there is at least some advantage in having a gun that shoots small. Even that environment doesn't have many small targets.
This is going to be debated forever because you can see it anecdotally through a really precise system and thousands of rounds at small targets. It is unnoticeable at large targets at normal round counts for average hunters. Also, really good shooters and wind callers can cover it up on average size targets. Give a guy that's almost perfect a 1.5 moa system and a 2 moa target and he won't miss much despite the fact that he only has a .25 moa margin of error. Hand a novice a 1/2 moa system and he suddenly has a .75 moa margin of error to miss with. That will add significant hits to his score over only having .25 moa margin of error.
There are too many variables that effect this argument. When the bullets are only capable of shooting 1-1.5 moa there is a lot more noise in the system to cover up the .25 moa or so improvement you can see with nodes. When your system is so good that everything is half moa it is a much larger improvement as a percentage to knock .25 moa off the group.
Honestly, if you shoot a mild powder charge and have really good barrel blank, reamer/design, gunsmithing, brass, and bullets, just about everything shoots really well. I'm just reiterating what you said above here. For most people, with the exception of benchrest, f-class, and long range varminters, it will shoot better than good enough. To me it's the easy button where I don't need to monkey with load development. Just use good stuff and go shoot.
