You too?
I've always been sort of a non-snobby brand snob. I always used Alliant pistol powders, so I just bought whatever Alliant powder was appropriate for what I wanted it to do. The caveat to that is, of course, Unique does everything I want in every cartridge, for the most part, so buying other pistol powders was only dabbling. The problem came when I bought some 2400 for the .41... I don't know what it is, but in 30+ years of reloading, I've never been able to get 2400 to shoot well. It works... for sure... but we've never really gotten along... so one day, I picked up a can of W296. We quickly fell in love, and started making plans. Granted, it's not as versatile as Unique, or even 2400, but it sure did what I wanted it to do.
These days, I've tried some different pistol powders... some because I stupidly ran out of Unique and I had to grab what was on the shelves (2010'ish...) Some worked well (RedDot, TiteGroup, IMR4227...) and some didn't (TiteGroup, SportPistol, BE-86.) Now that I'm restocked on Unique, I'm left with a bunch of powders I'm trying to load out and be rid of... so I won't be doing that again. The only jewel in the bunch was, really, IMR4227, which I still use for .41MAG loads in my Marlin.
Rifle loads, again, are brand-conscious: IMR. The IMR product line makes sense to me... I can load everything on the bench with IMR's 4198, 3031, 4895, and 4064 (I don't shoot Magnum rifle cartridges.) The one caveat to that, for some reason, was H335 strictly for 5.56mm. I had issues early on trying to stuff all those IMR sticks into that tiny 5.56mm case. I'm sure I looked at the data and product description of H335, and that it was, basically, the equivalent of what LC uses for factory 5.56mm... so... easy pick.
Lately, I've been thinking about slimming down the powder stash. Because I usually buy powders in 8# cans, I would have a stock of roughly 50-60# of powder onhand at any given time... which isn't super smart given my domestic setup. To that end, I've tried to find powders that might replace 2 or 3 powders already on the shelf... which means thinking outside the IMR box. H335, for example, will work in all my military cartridges (5.56mm, 7.62mm, .30-06,) but the muzzle blast and flash make it a 'no sale.' I've recently tapped into Ramshot TAC... and it's sort of been the Golden Child of powders... early testing suggests it can replace IMR3031, 4895, and 4064, as well as H335... so 4 powders into 1! It sounds almost too good to be true, but I'm going to give it a whirl.
I've also tried some of the newer powders, both pistol and rifle. I've not found any of them to be any better than what I've already been using for the past 30+ years. They can give them tricky names, and advertise that they are loaded with new features, but at the end of the day, they don't beat Unique or W296 (pistol,) or IMR's standard rifle powders.