ME has little to do with it. It always comes down to the bullet or boolit and where and when energy is applied INSIDE the animal.
Take 3 bullets of different construction, all with the exact same ME. One explodes on the skin, another does all damage inside and another pokes a hole.
You need energy with any gun but it is how and where it is applied. It is false to assume energy is lost when a good boolit exits an animal because if it did the work in the animal, you need no more. A bad boolit is another story if nothing is done to the animal in passage. A boolit that stops has no such thing as DUMP. It can fail for a lot of reasons and can lose all energy applied by breaking up or stopping on bone.
Bullet construction is always what makes them work FOR THE VELOCITY SHOT. Even a large bore rifle can fail with the wrong bullet with tons of energy on the wrong animal. Hit a deer with it and it is mush, hit a buf and he will stomp you into the ground.
Shoot a deer with a .50 caliber revolver and some do not even flinch. You will destroy their insides but you do not blow them like a pendulum. Yes, you can use such extreme energy that an animal will blow into mist but none get knocked over or pushed across the ground. Even a tank hit with the best does not get knocked over.
Exit holes and internal damage is based on the boolit used and the velocity shot and where energy is used.
A larger hole from a revolver means nothing compared to a rifle because the rifle might have done twice the internal damage from energy applied then the revolver boolit. The revolver boolit is larger on exit because it was soft enough to expand. It was larger to start with.
Junk science, pendulums, steel plates, water bottles, jello.
Real science is an animal on the ground fast with a huge blood trail.
Inelastic collisions and elastic collisions means bone or lungs. Your boolit must weather both.