Been thinking a lot about this after the excellent advice I've received from you all. I have 2k Hybrids all same lot # sitting ready for next season's BRA barrel and I think I'm going to add sorting to the mix rather than just pointing them all at the same setting. Thought I'd run my plan by you guys to make sure that I don't screw anything up, and that I'm not wasting effort either. Here's my tentative plan...
1) Sort base to ogive with Sinclair bullet sorting comparator and dial indicator. Hopefully end up with 4-5 piles of bullets.
2) Tackle each BTO sorted lot individually, measure OAL and break into 3-4 sub-lots by OAL.
3) Point (or meplat trim + point) each sub-lot, adjusting the die so that the pointing is "ideal" and non-damaging for each length lot.
4) Evaluate, and potentially consolidate some of the sorted bullets once all are pointed. I'd need to end up with lots that were at least a couple hundred bullets in size which might dictate combining some of the lots. A match for me can require 250-300 rounds. Probably would keep the BTO sorting, then consolidate some of the OAL sublots and the tail ends of the distributions unless they were terrible outliers. Likely would end up with a "long" and a "short" division for each BTO lot, to keep organization manageable.
End result would be BTO sorted bullets, and if I did the trimming/pointing right the points themselves would all be similar in size/quality. I'd be getting a metplat trimmer for my Giraud, which indexes off the ogive and the only way to trim consistently with that would seem to be BTO sort followed by OAL sort. The BTO sort would eliminate the variation in the tail end of the bullets and the remaining variance in the nose could easily be captured by measuring OAL. This would let me both trim (referenced off the ogive) and point (referenced off the base) with some degree of consistency expected in the point.
I suppose if I skipped meplat trimming I could simplify the sorting and could try the approach that
@Ned Ludd suggested, OAL sort then point for each OAL lot. But then I would be skipping BTO sorting which seems to be the consensus best "one way" to sort bullets. Not sure on that, or on how much correlation there is between BTO sorted bullets vs OAL sorting.
Thoughts/suggestions?