neck size with the LCD for one of my 223's and get great results.But I'm not pushing it very hard,so I don't have to do much with the shoulder.I set the headspace pretty tight when I put the barrel on and for this rifle everything worked out ok.I like the way the die works to keep runout low and I don't have to turn necks or use separate mandrels.I'm a firm believer that some kind of expander has to be used unless case necks are very consistent.
That covers many of the key issues. I too neck-sized-only for many years with an LCD largely because handloading was a dining room activity for me and until the family grew up and moved out I didn't have space for a conventional mounted press and mostly used the Lee Hand Press.
Also, and crucially, I was loading for Historic military rifles and kept pressures and MVs very low. The LCD alone worked fine in this situation with multiple loadings and no need to 'bump' shoulders. With slack chambers and cartridges prone to case separation like 303 British in Lee action rifles, the LCD preserved case life too as well as giving a better case to chamber fit. (This was long before the days of the Stoney-Point / Hornady 'headspace' case comparators and we understood little about how vital shoulder position is. FL size and we did it by the maker's instructions with the shellholder hard against the bottom of the die body at full press operation and in many cases created seriously excess headspace.)
As soon as I started loading for modern rifles for higher precision applications and higher pressures, all previous practice went out the window. Shoulders on many cartridge designs move forwards very quickly under full pressures so even a second firing with a NS-only case can see longitudinally tight brass in the chamber. Moreover, as with everything else in rifles, chamber pressures and its effects on the brass vary considerably shot to shot, so the consistency of brass to chamber fit goes out of the window, one case a crush fit; the next an easy one. Body sizing, or shoulder bumping alone (as with the Forster Bushing-Bump dies) is essential if anything like normal pressures are involved never mind high ones.
These days, I still use the LCD (or at any rate older LCDs which as some have pointed out are superior for our purposes) but always allied to either FL body sizing, or in a couple of cartridges, the Forster shoulder bump die (minus the neck bushing) and knock shoulders back by one, at most two, thou'. I've found that in 223 and 308 gunsmith cut 'minimum SAAMI' match chambers, shoulder bump alone is fine and have gone through several barrel lives worth of loadings without ever having to size the case-body itself down.
Finally, even going back to the days when it was 'received wisdom' that NS alone gave better precision (which few if any precision shooters still believe nowadays), it was recommended that all brass to be used in factory rifles should be FL sized. This wasn't simply a reliability issue for deerhunters (let alone those facing elephants and other lethal species), but because a generation or more ago many factory rifles had out of true chambers and the FLS method gave better results on the target. That is far less of an issue (in fact not an issue at in all bar the occasional rogue example) in these days of CNC machining and far superior tooling and quality control with much higher factory standards.
