Robert. You make a good point for the "high priced spread", but if I may, let's look at the lesser "spread" for a moment. One of the big reasons premium ammo and bullets are touted so much in the gun rags, is beause the "egg-spurts" get them for FREE. We make up the difference in the higher price we pay for the stuff. With that said,I would imagine that most game shot at with regular ammo, not the premium stuff, is brought to ground, probably 95 percent of the time, if not more. I've only used premium bullets a couple of times on a hunt. I've not been satified with them. Oh they are accurate, all right. Let me give the prime example. This was on a very large bodied Mule Deer. When field dressed, skinned, head removed, legs cut off at the knees, he weighed out at 295 pounds. This was the biggest deer I have ever killed, or even seen for that fact. My usual deer load in the 30-06 is a stiff load of IMR-4831 and the 180 gr. Sierra SPFB. I was out of them, and had to use the load I'd worked up for an elk hunt. Same charge, but with Nosler Partitions. Both shoot to exactly the same place in my rifle. Velocity, 2750 FPS. I jumped this deer at about 40 to 50 yards tops. The first shot was, from his reaction, right in the heart. Number two was a high lung shot. Three broke an antler, four a complete miss, and the fifth and last shot, after I settled down, broke his neck and put him down. After the first two shots, I got a bit rattled. Started thinking maybe that deer wasn't human or something. The autopsy, if you want to call it that, was very revealing. The first shot did indeed hit the heart, fairly high on the top of the organ. The bullet left a finger sized groove in the top of the heart, but failed to break through the wall of the heart. The lung shot left a very narrow path through the lung tissue, not much bigger than a nickel. The neck shot shattered the spinal chord.
This deer BTW, was so old, I doubt he'd have made it through another Winter. His teeth were worn down to the gums, and I'm sure he would have starved to death before Spring. Turns out there was a fairly goodly amount of snow that Winter.
So I'll stick to conventional bullets for my hunting. I may use bullets a bit heavier than what is considered the norm for a particular game animal, but in 45 plus years of hunting, I've lost only two animals. I regret those two, but in one case, it was totally impossible to go where the animal went, and the blood trail quit fairly quickly on the second. The ground was like concrete, so no tracks were left at all. Shot the deer at about 8AM and did not quit till it was too dark to see. I did my best.
So I stick to conventional bullets, try to get as close as possible, and darn well try to put the bullet in the right place.
Paul B.