A good bullet, delivered in the right place will almost always deliver a satisfactory result when hunting.
Face it, there is no such thing as a perfect bullet, because it is impossible to design.
What are your most important parameters and in what order of ranking are they important?
Accuracy, penetration, retained weight, etc.?
Or just the result, dead game?
All bullets are compromises, because if you want a reasonable market share you have to convince a lot of folks that your product is good and everyone looks at these things slightly differently, so necessarily bullet mfgrs produce products which hopefully satisfy as many as possible.
I am still surprised how some bullets which have reps of high frangibility [Nosler BTs for example, in smaller calibers] often deliver great penetration. I remember hitting a hog in the shoulder from close range with a 150 gr BT from a .280.
It thoroughly penetrated both shoulders and almost blew the offside foreleg off. I did recover some shards of the bullet but there wasn't a whole lot left.
Still the piggie dropped on the shot and croaked very quickly.
Shot placement is everything.
Did this bullet fail?
Well I guess technically it might have in the sense that weight retention was almost nil.
If you set the argument up in advance you can almost always skew it to support your "facts" [often observations based on limited data points] but in the real world dead game is pretty much the determiner of whether a bullet "worked" or not.
