Advice interpreting a ladder test result

[lightshooter]

I'm not an expert on the ladder method, but it's my understanding that you should be looking at the vertical and not the horizontal dispersion, i.e. the waterline. In which case there's a lot of the loads fit into a waterline on the OP's target. There are serval loads creating a good group and even 2 touching in the 75-76 so it's easy to get swayed in that direction. So IMO the paper does lie, because of bias to groups and if your marksmanship skills are lacking. IMO the numbers don't lie as long as you can consistently reload and you have a magnetospeed or labradar or some other trustworthy chronograph.
Don't get me wrong I have faith in the ladder method and I believe it works, but if I came home with that target, I'd view it as inconclusive.
So I guess one could ask themself what do they have more faith in, their reloading skills or their marksmanship skills and choose the their preferred method.

 

[L.Sherm]

I shot a 3 shot group in my 30-28 that all 3 shots were 3122fps but the group was 1 m.o.a more like 1.25 so if your looking at just pure velocity numbers hows that get any better, in my opinion it sucked.

 

[lightshooter]

Is the Satterlee method obscured by variables in ES/SD though? Since it's based completely on speed readings?

I'm not sure that I understand your question. I don't have a degree in statistics. Maybe someone smarter than me can answer this one, but the variables in velocity is the es/sd very simply put, obviously it's more than that.
I think that to embrace the satterlee you have to give up on shooting tight groups, just for the first few tests. It's hard because we all want to shoot tight groups. When I first got my magnetospeed it took me a bit to get used to this idea. After I collect data from the first test I do shoot a few groups on paper without the magneto to verify grouping and just for satisfaction, but if it's not as tight as I want I just know that I have a bit more tuning to do.