Consider that the military loads ball ammo with ball powder, and they are very picky about wide temperature range performance. That said, ball powders are more finicky about ignition. Hatcher described working up match ammo with fine grained (I think this preceded ball powders but was as close as they got; I'll have to go back and look up his dates) and stick powder and found that even though the armory's powder metering equipment metered the fine grains with about twice the precision of the stick powder, the latter loads out-shot it. He attributed this to better ease of ignition of a longer grain stick powder.
Hatcher would have been using corrosive primers between the wars. Modern military primers address the cold temperature ignition issue by using a magnum-strength priming pellet. CCI #34 and #41 primers are the same thing, lacking only the full DOD certification testing and having nickel plated primer cups.
Going to magnum primers isn't the only approach to improving ignition. I used Accurate 2520 for one season when my M1A was still my main service rifle match gun. I was shooting 168 grain SMK's at the time and Federal 210M primers. I found the best grouping load went from 1.25 moa to 0.75 moa when I started deburring my case flashholes, which makes the ignition flame present itself more uniformly. I think I was using up a bulk purchase of Remington cases at the time, but can't recall for sure whether the experiment was with that, Lake City, or IMI Match cases? In any event, all my ball powder loads now go into cases with deburred flashholes.
I tried the same trick with stick powders, but could not see any improvement using deburred flashholes with them. They shot well either way, including groups the same size as the smaller 2520 groups. As a result, I went back to stick powder in that gun just to avoid the hassle.
Nick