I agree with Ric 100%, that's what works best for me too. I was turning custom expander spuds from bolts long before I had a lathe, plus buying the RCBS cast bullet expanding dies and spuds (much better shape in my opinion to the stepped M spuds).
James advocated what amounts to .004-5" interference fit, which is almost what you get using standard dies. He and I talked a lot about that and he spent a lot of years figuring out through extensive testing that he got the best accuracy doing that. Basically what he said to me was if I couldn't see where the lube grooves were through the brass, it wasn't tight enough. Remember, he used a lot of WW296 for his .44 loads and almost exclusively used water-dropped straight wheelweight alloy, so his bullets were around 24 bhn and could withstand being loaded in tight brass. The neck tension is what makes 296 burn consistently. This worked for him and will work for anybody doing what he was doing...which doesn't apply to everything we load in a .44. If your powder lights a little more easily (like 2400 or True Blue, for example) you may not need as much tension, nor as tough a bullet, and will actually do better with less case tension. Magnum revolvers of course require the bullets be retained firmly, but I say only as much tension as necessary should be used, not as much as you can get. Your targets and chronograph statistics will tell you what YOUR system needs if you experiment a little.
One of the big takeaways for me from conversations and reading about revolver loading techniques is not to rely on crimp to retain the bullets. Crimp is just icing on the cake, and you should be able to shoot all but the hottest loads with no crimp applied and the bullets shouldn't creep out under recoil.
A GOOD expander spud design should have fairly abrupt taper to the part that's actually expanding the case mouth and that tapered shoulder should swage away any burrs or sharp edges on the case mouth. Chamfering helps, but so does expander shape.
