Deer hunter,
My point was that if you have alot of variability in the bullets themselves, it will show up in your base-ogive measurements. There's no way around that. And just sorting by bearing surface may or may not fix your seating depth measurement issue. Your targets will tell you whether the variability you are seeing in your measurements are meaningful. I've seem some bullets that were pretty jump tolerant and others that were really sensitive to seating depth. With the type of variability you are seeing, I'd be seating either jammed hard (like 10 thousands plus) or well off the lands. Right at the lands would be pretty iffy if you have a +/- 8 thousands effective seating depth variation........

I'm not shooting much 22 cal stuff right now (except for ar-15 plinkers), but when I was, I shot Bergers and they shot great. I do know that in the 6.5MM stuff where I've been sorting and measuring ALOT of bullets, the Bergers (130's and 140's) and Lapua Scenars (123's) had the least amount of variability. Lapuas were the best and Bergers were right behind them. I just load them and shoot them. Last time I shot alot of SMK's, they were 130 grain 7MM bullets in a 7mm-08 tactical rifle. As I recall, they had pretty high variability - shot OK, but not truly great.
Elkbane