What changes is not physics but the success with which we communicate, and the requirements for the physical properties of cases, that may loaded quite differently. If a case does well on targets, and the load has good ES numbers, then as far as I am concerned, the process is correct, and no matter what, if these are not right, then it is wrong. As far as seniority of experience goes, until and well after Ken Light enlightened (yes that is a pun) us about annealing, the world was, and in some cases still is in the relative darkness of the stand them up in a pie pan of water in a darkened room/ dull red glow mode of ignorance. What we are doing is not full annealing. There is no standardize term for it, but I know it when I seat bullets, and measure bump. The seating force and amount of bump become significantly more uniform, without the elasticity of necks being destroyed as it is when a full anneal is done. Perhaps someone's loads shoot well with dead soft necks, but I have not experienced that, nor has anyone else that I know. On the templilaq thing, we pointed the torches at the middle of of the necks, and striped the cases (at first with .300, 400, and 500 degree) from the outside corner of case shoulders down to the head, to see how the heat was moving down the case. After that initial session, when we managed to set the time so that the annealing was satisfactory, we discontinued the two lesser temperatures, and just did our setups with the 500 degree, so that the time in the flames darkened it to about where the color is on a new Lapua case. I wouldn't worry too much about duplicating factory annealing. We originally got the two torch (not a Light) machine because of inconsistent shoulder bumps of Winchester 7mmWSM and .338 Lapua cases. After they were annealed, neck tension was still good, and the shoulder bumps varied by only .001. The Lapua brass only had one or two firings on it when we discovered the problem. I might also mention that not once during the whole successful process did we bother looking inside of cases to observer annealing colors.