Commercial herd here; SimAngus base, dating back to 1980s genetics, with more recent infusion of Angus sires over that old linebred Fleckvieh-influenced SimAngus herd. We went to Shorthorn sires for 'maternal' traits, but the steer contemporaries of those halfblood Shorthorn heifers we were breeding for were every bit as good as the Simmental-sired calves bred at the same time, and beat the pants off anything by an Angus sire out of the same group of cows.
We have used mostly Waukaru sires because they were readily available from OriGen through our ABS rep, with no extra shipping charges. Also sampled Captain Obvious and the Rob Sneed '034' bull. The CO steers just didn't have the performance we got from the Waukaru sires. The 034s were pretty good, and I like the 034 daughters we got.
Waukaru Goldmine 2109... I'd use him on ANY heifer... they come slender and easy; steers grow off nice, and the Goldmine daughters may be the best SH-crosses I've got.
Waukaru GoldCard 5042 (WW epd ~92) was used on bottom-end cows, and only a couple of daughters stayed, but I'm beginning to think he worked better here than we thought - he just didn't go into good cows, for the most part. Considering going another round with GoldCard.
Waukaru Coppertop 464 - did everything right here. Daughters are good, steers were great. Would like to have seen a modern genomic analysis on him - he had 4 of the 6 GeneStar tenderness gene markers and 3 of the marbling gene markers, IIRC.
Did a progeny-test breeding trial for Waukaru a couple of years back, comparing Orion 2017 (a PatentXCoppertop) to Coppertop. 3/4AN-1/4SM cows. Orion steers weaned at avg. 697, Coppertop steers at 657; on mama's milk and grass only; no feed or supplement other than minerals. Performance in feedout trial was good, with one Orion son bred here topping the trial. JTM's seen the data on those.
All but one of the Shorthorn-sired calves in this spring's crop are by Patent... all look great; time will tell as to how they'll pan out, but they're holding their own against calves sired by high WW Simmental sires.
I keep telling folks how good Shorthorn-sired calves are... and commercial cattlemen could (can!) benefit greatly from using the right sort of Shorthorn bulls in their breeding programs.