D&D 5E Horde Breaker and Heavy Crossbow Loading Property Question

[5ekyu]

You can trigger Horde Breaker off of Green Flame Blade or Booming Blade and those use the Cast a Spell action. Though you can't, of course, use either of those with a ranged weapon attack like shooting a crossbow.

Yes, but i keep coming back to the specific beating general and what is specifically called out here.

Horde breaker applies to all weapons.
Loading is a specific property that applies to crossbows and msybe a few others.

Further more the intent of the loading is clear to me

""Because of the time required to load this weapon, you can fire only once piece of ammunition from it when you use an action, bonus action, or reaction to fire it, regardless of the number of attacks you can normally make."

Regardless of the number of attacks you could normally make.

The feat gives you more attacks but cannot overcome the reload time.

 

[Yunru]

Horde breaker is not part of any action, and it's not unique in that either. There are undefined "free actions" such as using Action Surge".
And thus, you can use Horde Breaker with a loading weapon.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If you wanted to allow it, you could rule that the ranger loads two bolts at the same time, or the bolt ricochets to the second target. Normally, I would expect a crossbow ranger to pick up the crossbow master feat anyway, but in a "no feats" game I would definitely allow it.

 

[Kjeran_der_Unheilig]

There's only one way horde breaker can overcome reload without the crossbow feat.

https://youtu.be/LmZV7WtCRi4