It has been about a 50 year trip.
Started with a Lee Target loader and seated every primer one at a time with that. It made great ammunition but was slow.
Upgraded to a Co-Ax and primed on the press. The Co-Ax is one of the worst priming set ups I have experienced so it did not take me long to buy a Lee hand priming tool. And I read back then that hand priming was better because of the "feel". I used that for a long time for seating rifle primers. Still works too!
Upgraded to an RCBS hand tool and it worked. Still prefer the Lee even though it is cheaper.
Anyway used them both for decades to prime rifle cases. All my pistol ammunition is made on progressives that work, so I prime pistol ammunition on the presses.
About two years ago got the RCBS bench priming tool. I really like it but I do not load a lot of rifle (40-50 at a time) so I still wind up using the hand tools for most of my rifle priming. The bench tool will be used for .223 as we will be shooting more of it in the future.
The worst part of priming has been filling primer tubes for the progressives. Got the Frankfort vibratory thing and it kind of worked most of the time. Then got another thing that looks like a 1911. Great reviews on it but mine is a ***.
My mentor bought a Camdex in the late 70's and it had a vibratory feeder (Syntron or something like that) and it was fantastic. It would march the primers up a spiral ramp on a bowl and every darn one would be right side up and feed perfectly. Wish I could get one of those for the 1050's
In my musings, it was interesting that I still prime most of my rifle cases the same way I did decades ago using simple hand tools. And that no one has come out with a better way for handling hundreds of primers than that feeder on the old Camdex. I might have to try to build one now that I have lots of time.
BTW, came close a number of times to buying the Dillon primer feeder. I used to load 20,000 pistol rounds a year and I normally loaded in batches of 2000....filling 20 primer tubes at one sitting is not fun. But too many users could not get it to work 100% of the time, so I never tried it.