I agree Destry; the Mark V's are the best shotshell ever made and these paper equivalents are a favorite also. For smell I like the ribbed green Remingtons, which seem to pleasingly scatter a fair amount of aromatic paper wadding about the shooting grounds.
As for heavy loads, I tailor my loads to the gun. I have a #1- framed 12ga with a wispy fragile looking wrist that preferably gets 24gram handloads of very low pressure. With 26" cyl bbls why would anyone put a load like these through it unless they were out to vaporize birds?? I have a couple of stout 2-frame guns with wrists like a fresh Louisville slugger with no incipient tang cracks that get these heavy loads with no worries. I never put these loads through any of my 1-1/2-framed guns, which is most all of my 12ga guns. Not just for the guns sake either; these loads really whack you with recoil in a lighter gun.
Regarding the stock shrinkage issue, wood shrinks primarily, but not only, perpendicular to the grain, meaning that a properly grained gun stock, one with nice horizontal grain that goes through the grip, will mostly shrink vertically. If you cut a slab off the end of a round log and leave it to dry it will lose more diameter than anything else but it will also always split from the center to the edge somewhere, and wood continues to dry for a very long time. My log house is still shrinking after 22 years of wood heat - 1/4" per vertical foot is the rule. My walls get shorter every year and I hear an occasional 'pop' as some log cracks a bit. This is white spruce mind you so the initial moisture content is relatively high, but the concept holds for any type of wood. So, these vintage gun stocks do shrink some horizontally which, as David H says, imparts stress(tension) on the wood as the receiver and tang hold it from shrinking like it wants to. The obvious place for a crack to start is at the back of the tang which is precisely what happens. When you repair an incipient tang crack it makes sense to relieve some wood when you put the stock back on if necessary. I glued up a significant tang crack once and clamped it. When I tried to slide the stock back on it was tighter than when I took it off and needed a bit of wood very carefully relieved.
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