Hope you don't mind my jumping in here. It's nice to see my dad still getting cited on gun lore.
Dad was a fan of the Lee hand tools because they were cheap -- appealing to his Scottish heritage -- and easy to use. And yes, they're far easier to use with an arbor press. But by no means are the Lee tools "training wheels." Dad used a Lee seating die with several of his benchrest guns. Walk the line at a major bench match today and you'll still see lots of hand tools, including Lee tools, as competitors typically have no more than 30 or so carefully selected, trimmed, cleaned, reamed, and otherwise coddled hulls which they load between relays.
One note about the .22-250: Check the dimensions of your sized cases, particularly the length of the body from head to the shoulder, and the angle of the shoulder.
I once loaded up a mess of .22-250 ammo using a die set that Dad had lying around. At the range I was getting terrible accuracy -- more than 3 or 4 inches at 100 yards off a bench and using a target scope. Something was wrong with the gun or the ammo. Examining the cases Dad pointed out a bright stretch mark just above where the web of the case would be, indicating an incipient head separation. Examination of a freshly-sized case showed that the sizing die, clearly marked ".22-250", yielded a sharper shoulder angle and a shorter case body. The dies were correctly marked .22-250 but the rifle was a .22-250 Remington. The ammo I was producing was not headspacing correctly. In effect it was rattling around in the chamber. Lesson learned: Beware vintage dies in wildcat calibers. It is not unusual for there to be some evolutionary offshoots before the final commercial product.
