I miss DPMS of the mid 2000s.
They kicked out a mediocre product across the board, with many rifles that just wouldn’t run.
My LR-308 folded the extractor rim over within a few boxes of ammo back in 2007 right before I took it to a Sniper Competition overseas. I was able to get a replacement, but it wasn’t confidence-inspiring.
Anecdote for sure, but their own product manager told me when they sat down after Luth sold out the company to Freedom Group, they wanted to fix the LR-308. Everyone was commenting on little tweaks they wanted to make, and he just broke out with, “How about we make it actually reliable."
They made a list of things that needed to happen, and realized they were better off going with a clean slate. That’s how the GII was born. GII went through excellent design and development processes, extensive pyramid testing with man-firing and 100k rounds, then they sabotaged it by offering early 2000s-era pineapple quad rails from YHM on some of the SKUs, CLGS 16” barrels for the MOE, and crap that made most of the models heavier than they needed to be.
Those SKUs were handed over to DPMS production and QA left over from LR-308 and AP4, with predictable results of defecating the bed. It could have been a great product line with QA/QC overhauled, but the organizational culture was already in place to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.
