As TJ said..I shot a lot of shells at waterfowl. More on the order of a thousand shells. BUT most of them were shot at cripples(even in lead shot days). I guided quite a bit. My main waterfowl guns were Remington 1100's..2 3/4" and 3" fixed choke guns..Usually full choke. I shot over 1400 steel shot shells in one 1100 Trap bbl full choke gun one year. Steel really sucks as a sustitute for lead and the average person is a pretty bad shot. That 1100 bbl looked as good and shot as good after those shells as it did before. That was shot size to BB. When I started shooting T shot I found it didn't pattern as well as it should. Took a barrel hone(Brownells) and relieved the choke in a 3" 1100 bbl until I got it shooting good patterns. Shot that gun for 3 yrs exclusively with T and BBB shot. It never hurt the bbl any at all. And I have a bore micrometer. The bore expanded .002 in three yrs shooting more than 3500 Steel shot shells in it. Heck my measuring could have been off that much. So shoot those older Remington bbls guys. They can handle the steel(Remington even says so).
In the last 5 yrs I have used hevi shot almost exclusively for shooting mostly geese and find that I have about 90% DRT kills on geese..and the approx 100 or so ducks per year are about 85% DRT..but I shoot a lot of woodies in the woods so they are a little trickier. I still use steel for cripples and on the few teal I shoot. A long shot on teal is 20 yds where I shoot. A lot of the steel I shoot for cripples is some reloads of 1 1/8 oz of steel 6's I loaded for teal. This was in my save more money period. Loaded more than 3500 shells. Now they have steel target loads in 7's that are cheap and kill cripples well. Going back to Md to hunt in the Oct season on ducks..geese after they open and in Jan at the last of the goose season so we'll see how the new Remington HD shells work. One of the Reps gave me a few boxes to try out. Gonna try the shells on the geese out here too!