An old draft post I have to put out:

Res Ipsa started a blog. Another one I check daily. He started by posting about RCBS, and telling what a create company they are, and how good their customer services is. I have a few issues with them as a reloader. Not RCBS, but their parent company, Alliant Techsystems. I am just a little disgusted that Federal cartridges, another Alliant Techsystems company, sells factory steel shotgun ammunition that outperforms anything that you can reload. Federal sells wads, but not steel shot wads, and Alliant powder sells powder, but apparently not the high performance powder used in the factory shells. I don't understand why they do this. So I am stuck using Alliant's powder, and someone else's wads to produce shells that don't perform as good as factory. Well, that is not really true. What I mean is the premium factory loads are better than the best handload recipes. Reloading is about saving money, but it is also about better performance.

Steel shot reloading for waterfowl is just about a dead art anyway. The cost of the shot and wads has gotten higher, and the quality of factory ammo is much better and the price is much lower than it used to be. I still have some loads that beat factory velocity, but I can't match speed they get with large payloads.