We were loading them back in the 1970s as curiosities. Back then we were in production mode, as much as you can be with an old single stage press. For a while my favorite shooting gun was a M52 and that's the only round you can shoot other than forward loaded wadcutters. I've still got 2 boxes of 60 of them (thats how many fit the old Speer yellow plastic boxes.)
Just for fun we did a bunch of testing for accuracy. It should come as no surprise the M52 was dead accurate at 25 yards with its normal wadcutters. But with the reverse ones, it would open the groups up to about 6" or sometimes even more. And worse, the holes weren't always round at that distance. Some were more like smears. Recovered slugs were easy to distinguish between. The normal ones sometimes had some deformation where they went through a board. The backward ones were really a mess. Some clearly lost the skirt portion, but others were about an inch in diameter, like a heavy washer.
But then we took our little accuracy testing to another level. We started shooting them at 7 and 10 yards. At that range, the reverse ones were almost as good as normal. The 7 yard targets it wasn't unusual for all 5 shots to cut the same hole.
From my sordid youth, I discovered some other things. We had a family pellet gun. It was a Benjamin. And you could reverse the pellet when you chambered it. They delivered lousy accuracy. But something else I learned back then was how wadcutters worked. My backstop was a foam couch cushion. Well, really about a half dozen of them. Because something else I learned was you could recover them for a second life. Pellets were expensive and money scarce.
What we learned was the pellets would cut long worms out of the foam. Sometimes the forward facing ones would do that, too. But the open base would do it almost always. I remember my dad commenting on all the foam worms lying around our bullet trap. Full diameter, the length of the 6" cushions. Kind of core drillings.
I can just imagine a bad guy getting shot with a reverse wadcutter and someone finding a .357 diameter worm 10" long, with parts of the guys vitals cleanly cut from his insides.
One of the problems with bullets not expanding or being FMJ is the hole can maybe close and at least limit the bleeding. Can't do that with a big chunk missing. It provides a channel for the blood to exit. If nothing else, it will leave a good blood trail whereever he goes until he stops bleeding. That would be when he runs out of blood.
But I digress...
