To tell you the truth, I'd like to know who came up with the terms "hard" and "soft" primers. I'm beginning to believe the terms were applied simply because the foreign supplied Berdan primers have been less than good quality for many years. Is it possible they are just defective and don't ignite consistently or is the material the primers are made of really "harder" than that Boxer primers are made of? Or, are the Berdan primers just a little more brittle, thus the tendency to fail to ignite and shear into the firing pin hole?
All I know is, the empty cartridge will have a primer with a neat round hole in it, and the round piece that seperates will either be inside bolt, sticking in the firing pin hole, stuck to the tip of the firing pin, or loose elsewhere in the receiver.
None of the pieces that we've examined were actually "pierced" by the firing pin tip, they were simply "blown" out and into or through firing pin hole.
And when we changed the design of our FP tip, we again followed the example of the original Russian designed firing pin tip. Our theory is that the primer might be getting "cookie cut" due to a larger than normal amount of surface area that is unsupported at ignition. With an original or sharper tipped FP, there is a substantial amount of unsupported primer between outside diameter of FP and inside diameter of FP hole. With the larger radiused tip, (like the original Russians) you get almost complete support.
And yes, I definitely have seen rounds that were properly loaded into chamber, not fired but carefully extracted, and there would be a visible "ring" mark on the primer created by the FPs "volcano."
As much as I dislike "that" ammo, I dislike the foreign suppliers that export it to us even more!!! Why does that company export steel cased, Berdan primed ammo to America, but won't export any of their brass cased Boxer primed ammo, in 7.62x39? Keeping the good stuff and sending us the trash?

We've considered the idea of creating a FP tip that had a small .050 to .060 tip for the first .030, then increasing to the .090 diameter, so that a smaller tip actually ignites the primer, but the larger area helps support the primer surface. But we haven't had a chance to extensively test this design as we also want to include testing of bolt that has had a bushing installed that simply reduced FP hole size from .090 to the more normal .060. That may prove to be a better cure than anything else.
I'd prefer that "they" just let loose with some of the good stuff.
