My friend and I have been reloading for our precision rifles for about a year now.

My steps to load precision rounds (fired)is:

Dry tumble Federal brass
Lube/ neck size
Anneal if needed
SS wet tumble
Trim if needed
Chamfer
Prime
Charge
Seat 178AMAX

His steps:

Dry tumble Lapua brass
Lube/ neck size
Anneal
SS wet tumble
Trim
Neck turn
Chamfer
Prime
Weigh/ sort primed cases
Charge
Seat weight sorted Berger 185 or Lapua 155 bullets
Check and correct concentricity
Weigh again

Our rifle's 5 shot group is within .2" even though I'm using "cheap" components.


The way I see it is I get to save time and shoot more for the same money.

Where do you stop?

What type of rifle, a bench rest rig?  0.2" 5-shot groups, at 100-yds? Are you doing any long range shooting with this ammo (500 - 1000)?

Neck turning for every load, I'm not sure about that, sounds excessive.

Weighing and segregating / culling out cases may not be unusual for long range / high precision shooting.

Weighing high quality bullets, sounds excessive, how much variance is there?  When I weighed good quality Sierra or Hornady bullets, I stopped after a few, not enough variance to matter.

I know from experience that concentricity, within reason, can be overemphasized.  As long as you are under 4-5/1000 in runout, should be ok.  Using high quality components, equipment, and sound process usually limits runout.  (I use a Coax press and its great for alignment when seating with a good competition seater die.)

If you are getting 0.2" with both loads, and that's your targeted range for performance, looks like he has more diminishing returns than you.  That's amazingly tight.

I do not think that every thing about precision reloading will show in your 100 Yard group, go out to 400 to 600 yards and the difference will show a lot more, but the finer you try to get it the more it will take to make it improve,  so you have to decide how bad you want it

His is a Kimber 8400, I own a customized AAC-SD.

His groups are around 0.35-0.4 while I shoot ~0.5 at 100

0.2 from each other.

He doesn't compete or anything. We've shot long range, but usually stay around 300-500 for most shooting, which is mostly steel or water jugs.

There's no noticeable accuracy difference at range, just have different dope

Weight sorting brass is a futile exercise in futility.  Second to cleaning primer pockets manually.

ayup.  Weight sorting bullets has a little more validity but I still won't do it unless I get into shooting beyond 500.

There are some that will say that weighing bullets or brass is worthwhile for finding that one that will cause a flyer they cannot afford in tight competition.  Maybe, but when I have weighed top quality bullets and Lapua or Norma brass, I have not found enough variation to make a difference.  So in that regard for me it is an excericse in futility YMMV.  

As for the informal shooting described by OP, I challenge whether the friend gets any significant benefit from all the weighing and neck turning with high quality components on every load.   Any difference in groups could very well be other factors.  Only way to find out for sure is a tedious controlled test.  But its beyond me caring thats for sure.

If you are shooting 5" groups at 100 yds, then 0.2" is not significant.  (5.0" v. 4.8" would be about 4% better for him)
If you are shooting 1" groups, and he is shooting 0.8" groups, he is 20% better than you, and that is pretty signifcant (other way to look at it is that your groups are 25% bigger than his).  That is pretty significant.  
If you only ever shoot 100 yds, then you are doing fine.  Take it out to longer distances and it will be a bigger spread (at 500 yds you will have 5" groups to his 4").
Based on that you need to figure is it worth the extra effort to get x% better (can't just go off an absolute difference)

After a good bit of data gathering and observation, I have found that for my precision rifles, brass weight dispersion had precisely zero effect on both accuracy and velocity dispersion. In load testing with my .30-06 bolt gun, match-grade brass (Lapua and Norma) performed slightly worse than prepped HXP cases. I neck-size only for my bolt guns, so I don't trim or full length resize very often at all. For my bigger calibers (.243+), I also found that trickling charges had no benefit vs. thrown charges with my Lee measure, even with extruded powders. I could not detect a statistically significant difference in the muzzle velocity dispersion or accuracy between the two. I have played with flash hole uniforming, neck turning, the whole bit....most of it yields little to no benefit as far as my rifles and I are concerned. I have found that the most important variables for me are bullet selection, powder & charge, primer and distance to lands.

My process:
Dry tumble
Resize with collet die
Measure case length
Seat primer
Powder charge w/ Lee PP measure
Seat bullet

Go shooting. Once a case gets too hard to chamber or too long, they all get a FL resize and/or a trim.

Sorry missed that this was the OP when I posted above.  If he is 0.35 and you are 0.5, that's 30% better than your groups.  For precision target/bullseye shooting, I would think that is worth the extra effort.  For shooting steel and water jugs (your purposes) I'd agree that there would be no practical difference.