This is an awesome looking cartridge. I'm not jumping on the bandwagon or saying it's the next greatest thing, but it looks like a great design. I don't think it will really do anything spectacular that other cartridges don't already do. I love the .284 WIN case and all of the wildcats based around it. I thought up the idea of a .284 "Long" awhile ago, but it would be a near impossible cartridge to develop and have brass made for without having large funding or a company to back it.
I love this idea because it works on a standard long action, it doesn't have a belt (which doesn't hurt anything but is useless), it has a larger 0.500" body compared to the '06 and others at 0.473, it has a 35* shoulder and nothing weird or old school, doesn't require fireforming or custom dies because it's a SAAMI cartridge, and it will have factory supported ammo and rifles with SAAMI spec reamers that aren't proprietary or one off. The factory ammunition looks to be on the slower side to what it should be able to do with handloads. If it's truly the length of an '06 with the .284 body diameter, it should nearly duplicate the .264 Winchester, 7mm Rem Mag, and be right on the heels of a .300 Win Mag. I'm really interested in this cartridge. This is a big surprise to me coming from Weatherby though.
I'll also add, I hope Weatherby gets the SAAMI spec chamber throat right and doesn't make it excessively short or long. Nosler's new cartridges like the 28 and 30, have short SAAMI throats, so when building one you have to lengthen the throat if you plan running heavy for caliber, high BC bullets. This is the problem with the 6.5-284 Winchester/Norma. It's nearly impossible to have factory loaded ammo for that cartridge when there's so many variations of the chamber reamers. If Weatherby designs it correctly to keep the bearing surface of 140ish grain bullets in the neck and not the powder column, it will be perfect.
