Allen I'd tend to agree with that.
I remember a few years back the 9mm and the LEE mold in particular was the number one thread starter over at the Boolits site.
you could count on at east 3 threads a week pertaining to usually the two of them paired up or the mold specifically.
I always wondered where the whole thing went wrong, and usually blamed the mold design.
I had some pretty fair success with a couple of molds I had on hand but my load techniques were geared to what worked in the 45 acp, and then I embellished things a little as I went up on the speed scale.
once I got a design to HM-2 and we cut that 9mm mold almost all of my problems went away.
I had good case capacity, I wasn't damaging the base when seating, and I had a nose to help pilot me into the barrel better.
but that wasn't the final answer.
I still had too much case tension,,,,okay I know, never too much on a pistol, but right at enough to start smushin the bullet.
there isn't much I can do about a carbide die other than spin some polish in it, but what about the other end?
that is an area I could look over and maybe help myself out some, only I ain't got the tooling and no one was really selling the tooling I needed, or were they? and I was looking at things wrong?
time to start measuring some holes in some metal.
eventually I was able to cobble together a die set after digging though all of the 38/357/9mm die sets I have, measuring the spuds on all of the powder drop tools I had for the 550 and then looking inside all the seating dies I had on hand.
after all that I still ended up using a harder than straight ww alloy to resist case smoosh.
but I now have straight[ish] cases, and bullets seated straight into the case, and loads ranging from barely operates the guns up through almost jacketed speeds.
we as bullet casters like to think we control the whole process from scrounging to target, but we are all limited by the tooling purchases we make.
we don't even know what we are getting from one time to the next and in general we can't do much about it.