What caused the Rokslide shift to smallest caliber and cartridges?

[Choupique]

you must be really limited in the shots you can take. I can shoot ‘em anywhere.

That was my reasoning for getting a .338 win mag. I wanted to be able to shoot anything short of cape buffalo, and I wanted to be able to get a bullet through the animal and break important bones from any angle, because I may only get once chance ever at those kind of destination hunts. At the time it seemed like sound logic to me. I knew I could handle the recoil well enough. Why would I use a smaller gun? "Use the biggest gun that you can shoot well" was always my mantra.

Its still a valid reason due to caliber restrictions on hunts I might make one day, like a Nilgai ranch hunt or hopefully a guided grizzly hunt, so I wont be getting rid of it.

My experience with .243 and .223 on game up till finding that thread was all terrible. Kids shooting deer with both of the above and light traditional hunting bullets that never exit and non-existant blood trails through terrible terrain and deer only halfway dead at the end. Conversely, with a .338 win mag i get these nice clean big straight holes every single time. Its boringly consistent. Bang flop or 50 yard run with blood and bone chunks everywhere, every single time. I had found my forever gun and load.

And then a year later I find out that everybody I know is supposedly doing it wrong and you people are shooting grizzly bear at 300 yards with .223's and killing the shit out of them...

 

[Southern Lights]

O'Connor talking about fragmenting bullets on deer sized animals back in 1961 on bullets he used before WWII:

"With lighter big-game animals, the biggest problem is quick expansion instead of deep penetration. The right medicine is the bullet that expands rapidly and even disintegrates. I have gotten more instantaneous kills on Arizona whitetail deer, which dress out on the average from 90 to 110 pounds, with the Barnes pre-World War II 120-grain .270 bullet than with any other. It had a thin jacket and a soft lead core. When driven at about 3,250 at the muzzle, it was a bomb. I found that a hit anywhere near the heart would almost always rupture the heart with fragments. I never had one of those bullets pass through even a light deer or antelope with a chest shot, and I cannot remember anything but one-shot, instantaneous kills. In fact, I have even seen that bullet stay in the body of a coyote, and I cannot remember hitting a single coyote without killing it instantly."