Melvin doesn't strongly prefer one case to another; he has told me it is a matter of how much horsepower you want for a given bullet diameter. He chose the .284 Win to allow high performance with the .284 diameter. I have a .284 NULA and recently ordered a .260 Rem NULA. I can also tell you from experience that a longer barrel will increase the effective horsepower. When you start with a package as light as a NULA, you can afford to put more weight and length into the barrel and still have a modest total weight. Many people hold the 22" as a sacred length, and it is a reasonable compromise. They then cite its "handiness" for hunting, especially in the thick stuff. When asked what their cousin Bubba uses, he replies that Bubba likes his 12 gauge with "punkin balls" and of course the 30" full choke barrel. I hunt in the West and haven't found a situation where barrel length was all that critical for "handiness." Just as you can go to a "magnum" case capacity and gain 150-200 fps, a longer barrel can do it. No mystery there--see Hatcher's Notebook which reports trials from about a century ago, with the powders available then (you can do better today!)
