Marshall and Sanow I think got a lot of their earlier, better reputation because when they were doing their early studies, bullet design was not as grown-up as it is now. Yes, they were always trying to make extremely subjective shooting anecdotes fit into some kind of useful framework, but to an extent the kinds of loads they found to be effective and advocated for did work well for their day.
You just have to understand that the loads that worked best back then, tended to be very much compromises. If they wanted to get any significant amount of expansion and the tissue disruption that went with it, manufacturers had to stick to the light for caliber and as fast as possible loads. Today's JHP bullets don't need to be constructed in such a way that they are on the verge of fragmentation in order to exand consistently, and because of that they penetrate more uniformly, aren't shackled to high (for pistols) velocities, and expand both more consistently and often to a wider diameter.
Marshall and Sanow are an interesting read, at least, and are pretty helpful in learning the history of handgun bullet design and performance, as long as you keep in mind that the way they tried to frame ballistics data just wasn't successful at describing the real world performance of bullets outside of a very narrow and well-defined set of operating parameters.
You just have to understand that the loads that worked best back then, tended to be very much compromises. If they wanted to get any significant amount of expansion and the tissue disruption that went with it, manufacturers had to stick to the light for caliber and as fast as possible loads. Today's JHP bullets don't need to be constructed in such a way that they are on the verge of fragmentation in order to exand consistently, and because of that they penetrate more uniformly, aren't shackled to high (for pistols) velocities, and expand both more consistently and often to a wider diameter.
Marshall and Sanow are an interesting read, at least, and are pretty helpful in learning the history of handgun bullet design and performance, as long as you keep in mind that the way they tried to frame ballistics data just wasn't successful at describing the real world performance of bullets outside of a very narrow and well-defined set of operating parameters.