I agree with you that reloading 223 for blasting isn't a great deal right now. That's why I got even cheaper than the bucket of freedom and loaded up on cheap federal something something when there was a mail rebate. I think that was during black friday or something. After the rebate, it ended up at 33¢/round if I'm correct. Federal brass is crimped and really soft so not exactly a reloader's dream, but at that price I might as well just leave it on the ground. If you pay 40$ for a pound of powder and use 25 grains per round, that's 15¢ for powder. Add 10¢ a bullet (that's a cheap bulk bullet) and 5¢ a primer, and that's 30¢ in components right there. If you count 10¢ per brass (price you could sell it for, maybe), then you're not saving much. Better spend your time reloading any other calibre if savings is your goal.
Anyway, I'll probably go to brian for my brass (if/when I want to reload 223) because I don't want to prep it. With pre-processed brass, you can just throw it all in the progressive and load everything like you would load pistol ammos. Processing 1000-5000 pieces of 223 by hand is absolutely not my idea of fun, and acquiring a more or less good setup to do it automatically would cost quite a bit (around 700$ just for a giraud trimmer?) and still take time. I'd be willing to pay someone to do it for me for a small fee. And if that fee is too high, there's still those bucket of freedom or those cases of 1000 crappy federal I can get for cheap.
if you're already equipped with all the stuff to process large amount of rifle brass quickly, then rem ammos is better than fed ammos. You'll get more uses out of them, and there's no crimp.
