I guess I will give it a try until I get to factory spec length. Thanks Mathman.
In my experience, chasing the lands is overrated, at least in typical hunting and varmint rifles.
A lot of my precision rifle shooting is with the AR15 platform these days, so cartridge length is generally limited to 2.310" or shorter. In several cases with the most accurate setups, I've found best accuracy at much shorter overall length, like 2.235", despite that being .050"-.100" off the lands, or more. Other times close to the lands does work best, but it's definitely not a hard rule or even common enough to bet money on.
For my purposes, I start with the shorter of either mag length or max length to the lands. In many cases, that means going with mag length or shorter, which generally is no handicap if you're willing to experiment. Don't hesitate to go significantly shorter than mag length; I like to test to at least .100" shorter if possible. Jumping in increments of .030" works to get started, then fine tune in smaller increments depending how much care you want to put into loading. With a lot of bullets and applications, it seems to me that it's not worth chasing anything finer than about .010".
