People complain about the lock rings, but they are genius if you understand how they work. The rubber o ring in them provides enough resistance that you won’t move the lock ring by accident, yet you can easily adjust it by hand. If you don’t trust it, take a sharpie and make a witness mark on the die and lock ring and see if it ever moves.
I don’t like the set screw type locking rings. You adjust them, then when you tighten the set screw, it swells the ring out enough you’ll need a wrench to get the die out of the press. Next time you use the die, you’ll need to grab that wrench again to tighten it back to the place it was before.
I actually prefer the older Lee lock-rings over the newer spline rings for the exact reason you stated and the little wrench used to tighten/loosen the lock-rings is horrible.
