Russel I have never seen it done that way.
Scott I missed that at the chat and I agree an axe swing to SE cable will result in at least a little damage.
But consider 90% (a guess) of the services here are SE and with 20+ years in the trade I have only seen one time where an SE sustained damage that RMC would have prevented.
A cable TV installer drilled from inside the house to outside the house and hit the surface mounted SE. BOOM!
I am told he was fine and no fire resulted, I did see the see th SE and it was pretty messed up for about 6" either side of the incident.
My own service is SE, I bent up a piece of RMC to fit but it looked to ugly on the outside of my house, the 200 amp copper SE that I used instead hides a lot better.
SE is Service Entrance Cable after all.