Crimping and Seating Hornady HAP deforming bullet

So I've been struggling with HAP bullets for a long time. I played with various levels of crimp and seating depth and I still can't get the bullet to feed reliable. I often get failures to go into battery which I sometimes solve by just pushing the slide forward. This is never an issue with round nose bullets.

I've been using Hornady taper crimp and seating dies and I'm doing both steps in the same pull as the die instruction manual mentioned.

Now, this has not been an issue loading round bullets although the stem puts a ring around the round nose bullets.

The hap bullets get deformed a lot more either with the round nose stem or the flat stem. I think this is happening because of the crimping and seating steps happening at the same time. This doesn't mess up the shape of the round nose a whole lot because it just leaves a ring. The cone of the HAPs is softer since it's hollow.

My hypothesis now is that the reason I can't get the HAPs to feed reliably is because the cone gets deformed during seating and crimping. There's only one way to confirm this but I wonder if this makes sense to you all?

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Crimping and Seating Hornady HAP deforming bullet