Meplat does not help. I shot many deer with my 45-70 BFR at 1630 fps with no lung damage, just a hole and no blood trails at all, lost a few and some recovered over 200 yards. I made another mold with a WFN and it did no more. My boolit was too hard.
Then I got my BFR in .500 JRH and made a mold for a WFN. Same stinking problems with no blood trails and deer going 100-120 yards.
I figure the pressure wave from the flat nose was moving tissue out of the way in a secondary wound channel that collapses after boolit passage. Took the wind out of my sails.
I softened the 45-70 boolit and went to a HP and that was disgusting with a whole shoulder destroyed on exit and bloodshot head to tail. TOO MUCH!
I then softened half the nose on the JRH and deer hit the ground before barrel rise. Then I hit bone once and found this.
Entrance wound and ruined the whole neck too. Big boolit is on the moon. 440 gr at 1350 fps is too much on bone.
Now the .475 with hard boolits works, a 420 gr WFN at 1329 FPS does this to a deer heart.
No meat damage and 99% of deer on the ground-INSTANTLY. The .44 mag can use a HARD boolit too but velocity and boolit weight will lead to lost deer.
A RN works if you get nose upset to slow the boolit in passage--called "Dwell time."
Get the alloy or nose right and results are amazing.
I have about 180 deer kills with WLN and WFN boolits and know what each does in each caliber.
Just a flat meplat is not the answer.
The wrong choice with a boolit that expands too fast and stops inside can be a lost animal. Same with the wrong bullet so beware of some HP's.
Wrong bullets for any gun can be a disaster. I helped a man in PA drag out a small buck. We had snow, he shot a buck behind the shoulders, it dropped, got up and ran, He tracked and shot again and again until he had 6 shots I covered with my hand. He tracked and shot near 2 miles. He was using a 30-06 with 180 gr Silvertips made for moose size animals.
Not talking bad hits but a bad hit will not work no matter the gun. A guy shot a small doe in Ohio with a 12 ga. Over and over, tracked in the snow until he had 11 shots in her. It was a hank of skin at the end but kept going over and over. We had no doe season so he wanted the farmer to hide her in a barn. Farmer said 'NO." Farmer told me it was shot up so bad, there might have been 4# of meat left.
You can tailor cast to work or fail in the extreme. Sadly, no way to check before you put them to use and see what you get. Forget water, mud, sand or paper.