James, I do give you credit for making the effort to design a bullet specifically for the Marlin 44. There is a need for bullets tailored for lever actions as demonstrated by the popularity of the RD molds. Lever guns can be very picky about what they will feed and few shooters are willing to do the experimentation required to produce a "proven" design.
I could show you my pet designs, but I do not claim them to be the universal bullet for every application. My designs are tailored to my guns and my purposes.
My philosophy on meplats is to use as big a meplat as the gun will tolerate and still produce decent hunting accuracy. By "decent," I mean as well as I can shoot under field conditions with iron sights. Say, 6 - 10 MOA in a packing pistol or 3 - 4 MOA in a ghost-ringed Marlin.
That said, at lever action velocities and with hardened WW alloy, flat point bullets usually "rivit" on impact, becoming nearly a full wadcutter, so one need not lose sleep over meplat size, within reason.
Meplat may be more important for handgun velocities that are too slow to "rivit" the nose as rifle velocities normally do. Meplat may also be more important for "between the ribs" lung shots where little resistance is encountered.
My philosophy on penetration is that most any hard cast bullet will penetrate satisfactorily, so there is no need to waste lead and pulverize your shoulder attempting to create a load that will penetrate more than the other guy's load in some artificial test medium. If the bullet shatters both shoulders of a bull elk and keeps on sailing, I can force myself to live with that.
Pics show complete penetration through both shoulders of 5 point bull elk. Excessive meat damage. Bullet exited. Elk went down and didn't get back up. Marlin, heat treated wheelweight.
Guess the cartridge. Was it .... ???????
A) 45/70
B) 450 Marlin
C) 50 Alaskan
D) 444
E) 44 mag
F) 357 mag