What prompted my comment about not boring on the way back out of a hole, is that in all my contact with long time journeymen during seven year work in the shop that I served my formal apprenticeship in, which was a sizeable busy place with lots of men working, this was never done; if you took a spring cut, you returned to start of the cut and ran it back in. One factor that may have effected it is that most of the machinery was pretty well worn and misaligned and just plain sloppy; feeding back out may have caused the cut to deepen due to the carriageracking on the ways, this is especially a problem on flat way machines as opposed to vee ways. Although they are not seen in industry, this particularly applies to the Atlas lathes, especially with wear and tear. In the shop above mentioned, we did not have any flat way machines, but all of them but two newer American Pacemakers were quite worn out, the wear down on the ways and carriages required approximatly 1/8" of shims to bring some of the tooling on center, and the tailstocks had about 1/16" of shims between the base and main casting. When feeding close to the chucks, the tools would dive in and cut significantly undersize, and it was a challeng to do acceptable work, which was possible, but at a cost of extra time to compensate for the inacuracies. On these lathes it would have not been possible to feed / bore on the way out.
A little controversy can be good for a forum such as this as long as it does not result in the personal attacks that plague the other sites that we have all visited and have been repelled by, and it was not my intent to attack others, but to state my opinion as to what I have experienced and have been taught along the way by competent professionals in my trade, which I have followed for 49 years and counting.