What I was searching for was a soft shooting reliable load for use in my club's defensive pistol matches.
I loaded up 20 rounds of each minium published load for every powder I had on had, which was around 17-18 powders. Of that number about half would not cycle the pistol with the stock RSA.
I don't know how to put together the correct sequence of words to describe the solution without offending but it is something like this.
Handloading at the minimum powder charge of a particular smokeless powder from a particular load manual using the specified bullet seated to the specified depth
does not guarantee a reliable soft shooting load. There are other factors besides using the start load that determine if a round of ammo is a reliable and
soft shooting for those who compete and desire such a load. And to make it more highly complex than it already is, it is possible that a load that is soft shooting in my handgun will be a monster in yours, or vis-versa.
Most, not all, but most looking for an action pistol event load which has a minimum power factor requirement and that is soft shooting will put the bulk of their efforts in developing a load using a
fast powder with a
heavy bullet. An example of a fast powder is Titegroup or Bullseye. An example of a heavy bullet in 9mm is 147 grains or 160 grains or somewhere in between.
I'm not saying that you cannot achieve a
soft shooting accurate and reliable load that meets powder factor in your gun using a light bullet and/or a slow powder but trying to use minimum load book data to meet your requirements is not doing it the easy way.
ON EDIT: It is very possible that a reliable
soft shooting load could be very inaccurate or do other undesirable things such as bullet tumble or dirty to the extent it gums up the works so the key here is to do load development and a lot of it. Load development consists of powder selection, powder load, bullet weight/profile/material/seating depth and to a lesser extent primer selection and/or case details and crimp or lack of.