Loved reading all 12 pages of this thread. I shot a 260 rem for years and loved that cartridge. The 260 is an underdog now to the 6.5 CM which I still don't understand really. I've never felt hindered handloading for a short action with longer bullets out of the 260, I never did go to the 147 or 156 class but I loaded 143 eldx and 140 eldm and thought it had reasonable performance gain over the 6.5 cm. I sold the barrel to fund a project to get my daughter shooting rifles but I've always wanted to build another 260. The 6.5CM is fine, I think one thing that gets overlooked about these newer hornady cartridges is that the chambers were designed around hornady's bullet/cartridge combo to shoot factory 147 eldm or 143 eldx ammo. Its a plug and play and accuracy is excellent in just about every rifle with that ammo. That is where the popularity comes in IMO. Anyone could buy a factory gun with factory ammo in 6.5cm or 6.5prc and the result is something that you are not going to see with the older cartridges that have soooo many ammo combinations for saami spec. Also the light recoil of the 6.5cm adds to its shootability factor making it a favored choice.
With that said, I'm building a 7/08 right now. Factory ammo does not do this cartridge justice. I thought about the 260 and even the 6.5cm for an ultralight build but the conclusion that I came to in my decision was because I wanted something I felt more confident shooting at elk in a pinch. This is going to be mostly a Mule deer/Coues deer rifle but I might get a wild hair and do another wilderness rifle elk hunt and I wanted something that had the larger "Outside Diameter" and just slightly heavier bullet selection. This rifle is a 500 yard gun for hunting and the 7/08 with 151 Patriot valley cayuga gives the ballistic chart some optimism up to 500 and maybe a little past that. also going to try the 150 eldx and 150 berger classic out of it and see if I can run a mono/lead core load in the same rifle and push it a little further for Coues hunting. I usually think of a rifles purpose and build around the cartridge that works. In this case the 7/08 was it. Also had experience with my dad and brothers rifles running 160 gr accubonds out of their 7/08 with awesome accuracy. I could go to that load if I needed to go a little heavier bullet.
I enjoy these discussions and I think this is a little closer comparison (red apples to green apples to yellow apples) vs some of the others like 308 vs 3006 (apples and oranges). My conclusion is that, if factory ammo was my option and I just wanted to plug and play then I would probably be more attracted to something like the 6.5CM, but with handloads I think the 7/08 has more potential in lethality and long range. No one mentioned running a 7/08 off of a long action which kind of surprised me, as mentioned above, I think a big pill seated long out of a 7/08 could have very nice performance and be fun to mess around with.
