I ladle pour, when I started casting some 50 years ago I just cast .58 Burton bullets of 400-500grs. wt. from a Lyman 20lb. cast iron pot on a Coleman stove for N-SSA compitition. I got my first electric pot in the 90's, a LEE 10lb. bottom pour and expanded my casting to include .45 bullets for a Springfield .45/70. I never could get good bullets from the LEE pot bottom pouring, too much lead I suppose so I took the linkage off and plugged the hole with a roofing nail and used it as a ladle pot. In the 90's Rapine set up at Nationals selling his molds and had expanded his line to include electric pots he had made somewhere, all were ladle type pots and I bought a 20lb. pot from him which I use to this day for 95% of my casting. Maybe if I had sprung the dollars for a Lyman or RCBS pot in the beginning things would have turned out different, but it seemed the LEE pot didn't pour fast enough to fill out a bullet over 300grs. plus I had to cut out the ''rest'' for the plug of the molds when casting hollow base Burton bullets.
Until about 2000 I cast over 2,000 hollow base .58 bullets a year. Now I rarely cast them although I still have four .58 riflemuskets and a .45 Springfield, most of my casting is 200gr. or less except for .44/.45 handgun. I may benefit from a bottom pour pot now.