The quote "...I believe I have seen more big game killed with fewer shots with the 7 x 57 than with any other cartridge" is from J. O'Connor's article "The 7 x 57: Cartridge with Nine Lives". In that same article, he says: "my own experience on big game with the 7mm Mauser is not wildly extensive." He talks about his wife using it in the same paragraph. Although he discusses many others (besides his wife) who used it successfully, it's not clear how many of those instances he actually had "seen". If his experiences with the 7 x 57 included a lot of personal use himself when he got older as part of the reason for the quote "...I believe I have seen more big game killed with fewer shots with the 7 x 57 than with any other cartridge" then that seems to be in conflict with his statement "my own experience on big game with the 7mm Mauser is not wildly extensive".
Damn - you sure get caught micro managing a single tree while missing the entire forest...
Not at all - I accept that both cartridges are very good. However, in Finn Aagaard's article on the .270, he starts off the article with a quote from Jack O'Connor and uses that same quote for justification at the end of the article as to why he adopted a 7mm as opposed to the .270 as his primary preferred cartridge. Now I am simply exploring whether that conclusion is based on a flawed premise. The importance of placing both the premise at the start of the article and the conclusion at the end of the article indicates that they are not insignificant to the whole article or "micro-managing" as you call it. Just to be clear, if, for example, J.OC saw 95 out of 100 big game killed with one shot with a .270, but had seen 180 big game killed out of 200 with one shot with a 7 x 57, then he would have "seen more big game killed with fewer shots with the 7 x 57..." than the .270, yet in the example, the .270 would have a 95% one-shot kill ratio whereas the 7 x 57 would have a 90% one-shot kill ratio.
