Set up a jig and you could form hollow points that way...

That’s a good way to do a comparison.

I e shot a decent number of plated bullets. It’s my understanding that they are swaged and then plated, so not very hard and the plating allows for higher velocity than bare, soft lead. Kind of like powder coating, you can use softer alloy and still be able to drive it harder.

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A long time ago. Probably in the 90's Ross Seyfried wrote an article where he used a 38 snub with 158 grain CCI Lawman ammunition to dispatch a wounded Elk. The bullet was one of CCI's RNFP plated type bullets. The bullet failed to penetrate the Elk's skull as it was too soft even though it was plated with copper.

This prompted him to test a 38 snub load that would do a coup de gras on an Elk. Seems he had another article maybe where he used skulls and bones from cattle maybe to test 38 loads. He came up with using the hard cast SWC which penetrated bone and skulls very well. That is if I remember it all correctly.