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I think both the title of this thread and the premise of the opening post are pointing at something that's too general to quantify. "Top" or "most popular" is another of those things that depends on how you measure it and what you measure. Are we talking about most popular in terms of firearms owned, new firearms sold in the last year (or in the last five years), popular in terms of commercial ammunition sold in the last year, or most popular in terms of total rounds fired in the last year?
Some people may own a lot of guns (even in one caliber) but not shoot them that much. I hardly qualify as owning "a lot" of guns (except to those who think one is too much and two or more constitute an "arsenal"), but I own a couple of 1911s that haven't been fired for several years.
Other people buy ammunition in relatively huge quantities as a hedge against inflation, shortages, or their estimation of when Armageddon will occur. Does having a stockpile of more ammunition than they can shoot in a lifetime make that round more popular? I don't know.
If ammunition sales is your metric for determining popularity, how do you account for reloading? I haven't purchased .45 ACP ammunition for years, because I load it. I have 9mm dies, brass, bullets and small pistol primers. I can (and have) load for 9mm, but I don't shoot it a lot and it's sometimes more convenient to just buy a box rather than change my press over for a small batch. I also have dies and some fired brass for .40 S&W, but I don't think I have any .40 S&W bullets and I can't remember ever having loaded for it.
In short, I think if we're going to discuss "most popular" cartridge or caliber, we first have to be clear what metric we want to discuss as the basis for measuring popularity. The opening post for this discussion mentioned ammunition sales, so IMHO that's the metric we should be discussing. If you want to discuss most popular in terms of firearms sales, that's perhaps a topic for a separate discussion.
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