I think that used to be the case, but i think now the civilian shooters are more demanding in terms of performance than the Military. Compare a modern commercial .308 to anything the military is using (that im aware of, again not my area of expertise) and balistically the civi round will out perform the military one
I am of the opinion that civilian rounds are more one dimensional than well developed military rounds. I do not consider the 5.56 a well developed round, it is a wild cat developed by a for profit Gun writer, and it has problems, which I have gone into detail elsewhere.
Why isn’t the army using aluminum cases? The 7.62 was a well developed round, at the time, it pushed the straight case envelope and was straighter than the average military round of the era. Case taper is good for feed and extraction, a tapered round will feed better, is more forgiving to slop in the tolerances. Compare pouring liquids, or grains in a bottle. You use a funnel with a cone shape. A straight taper cylinder does not work well as a funnel. In so far as extraction, straight cases drag. When case walls relax at a diagonal there is less drag on extraction than with straight case walls. The 5.56 is rather straight, it drags, and that is another source of unreliability as failures to eject are common, especially with steel case ammunition. Square ended cartridges create feeding issues and the best feeding rounds have a lot of slope on their shoulders. Good military rounds are not 65,000 psia round, the best ones work in the upper 30's to lower 40's, because high pressure causes extraction problems when the weapon, or the round, gets hot.
This Chinese round looks well designed, lots of case taper, thick rim, and operational pressures around 40,000 psia.
The post WW2 history of civilian rounds has been a history of maximum pressures and maximum velocity. Functional issues such as feed and extraction are hardly considered. What the market wants is horsepower! There is no replacement for displacement ! Shooters wanted recoil, muzzle blast, awesome kinetic energy numbers at distance.
You just had to hit the animal, somewhere, anywhere, to kill it, the wallop will do the rest!
And, without the maximum horsepower at range, you were going to be cheated
Today's civilian bolt rifles come with these three round, or four round magazines in which the top is pyramidal in shape, to place the straight case round directly in line with the chamber. There are probably some bolt rifles with a two round magazine capacity. My stripper clip reloaded NRA target rifles carried five in the integral magazine. For current rounds and rifles, many ten round box magazines are single stack and stick out like a keel on a boat. Similarly, they aground on the shoals. I shot decades of NRA highpower and I can attest that a rifle that jams in the rapids will ruin your score. It used to be that Marksman shot a lot of rounds out of the magazine, and often shot rounds against time. So reliability in feed and extraction was appreciated. But, the horsepower uber allies trend buried those considerations. Seldom do people shoot from the magazine, or rapidly from the magazine, and they seldom shoot enough to determine how reliable their weapon is, in terms of feed and extraction. A 264 Win Mag barrel is shot out in 700 to 800 rounds, one misfeed is 800 rounds is probably OK. One misfire every 800 rounds in a military weapon will get someone killed.
I believe with the decline in the hunting population, the market is moving away from magnumitis for magnumitis's sake, but not high pressure for high pressure's sake. The current trend is maximizing ballistic performance at miles, furlongs, planetary distances! Wahoo!
I don't have any of the current ballistic performance for ballistic performance sake cartridges, don't know how they are in terms of function reliability, but, I don't think the market really cares.
