ORIGINAL: The Rifleman
Just my opinion
But with the rising price of bullets and power and primers there is no way that a person starting out could justify reloading their own ammo.
My advice would be the rule of thumb that my dad taught me when I was a boy.
Dad gave me three 20 gauge shotgun shells to go hunting rabbits.
Everytime I came home with a rabbit, he gave me another shell.
Pretty soon, I didn't have anymore shotgun shells and when I had to buy my own, I took all my shots seriously. If I knew that it was a bad shot, I didn't shoot.
So instead of going out and shooting hundreds of shells in a weekend. Only shoot what you intend on shooting.
With this rule of thumb, a box of shells should last you a pretty long time.
Buying components and reloading your own will not produce a cheaper round.
By the time you clean the brass and clean out the primer pockets and buy all the components - you could have bought 2 boxes of factory loads to your one box of reloads.
Since the 223 is a modern firearm, it is already loaded from the factory to maximum specifications and there is not much improvement that you can make with a hand load over a factory load in that configuration.
You make a lot of very good points, but with all that said, how good of a shot can you be without being able to practice? Especially when it comes to shooting at a live animal. With the price of the components going up, sure, we pay for it at the counter piece by piece. But when we buy a box of shells we pay for each of those pieces still, excepts with a much higher markup. Idunno man, I have broke it down roughly and I can still reload for about half of what it costs me to buy a box of shells for. And when I cast my own bullets it gets even cheaper. Sure, there is a lot of work involved but some of us enjoy that part of it. Also, when you look at shooting as a recreation, something that I do with my kids it still comes out to be a pretty cheap hobby if you keep things within reason.