What you can get with the Polywads is something of a "donut" effect: weak center. You can usually solve that if you reload by either modifying the disc or else dropping a layer of shot on top of the disc. But I agree that they're a very short range load. Cylinder certainly limits your effective range, but patterns tend to be very even. Matter of fact, the guys who wrote the pattern analysis book (doing a brain dump on their names) said that you get more even patterns with no constriction than you do with any degree of choke.