[Unclenick]

Well, some military .30-06 brass is heavier than some commercial .30-06 brass, but that's mostly a significant issue with .308 Winchester. The reverse is often true in .223, and in .30-06 most Lake City .30-06 brass is in the range of 192 to 197 grains. HXP runs a couple of grains lighter. On the commercial side you can find old Winchester-Western (1980's and earlier) that weighs as much as 215 grains, while modern Winchester I've bought is as light as 185 grains. A lot of the Remington brass I've weighed is a virtual match to Lake City in internal capacity, and I favored it for a long time because loads for it were the same as for Lake City. But both vary lot to lot, and as years go by and outsourcing gets more common, you can't count on commercial brass to follow its past patterns, so you have to measure eac lot over again.

I hadn't heard newer Remington brass primer pockets were getting big early. Federal is famous for that because it's so soft. If Remington has switched to softer brass, then that's an unfortunate turn of events since the last time I got any in bulk (the mid-90's). One way in which military brass differs from commercial brass is that SAAMI doesn't impose a hardness standard but the military does. The NATO STANAG drawings I have of .308, for example, have a half sectioned case profile with hardness specs for different points in the section. This is why military brass is often tougher than its commercial counterparts.

If I had to buy commercial .30-06 brass today, I suppose I would go with Hornady or Winchester. Winchester has a lot of weight variation, but it seems to hold up to reloading well, and you can sort it by weight. If you sort into groups that are all within a 3 grain span, that's about equivalent to ± 0.1 grains of powder variation and you likely won't notice it in most instances.