I've had excellent performance from my DPMS AP-4 Carbine. All it does is run. Accurately too. A lot of people like to trash talk DPMS, and that's their prerogative. Most have never owned one, and are regurgitating what they read on forums.
Mine feeds any type of ammo, from the cheapest 7.62 X 51 MM Ball, to the exotic "Superformance" hunting stuff, along with every handload I've ever put in it. Direct Impingement AR .308's are A LOT less ammo sensitive then their Garand action, M1-A counterparts. I would never sell mine. That will be my wife's job after I take a dirt nap.
If you do get a .308 AR stick with the DPMS platform, and not the Armalite platform. They're a lot easier to find magazines and parts for.
DPMS no longer exists as a company. They were bought by Freedom Group, then shut down in 2020.
While your particular AP4 runs and shoots well, they were always hit and miss.
My 24” LR-308 had an extractor failure out of the gate. Also wouldn’t feed reliably, had to be finish-reamed again.
For sub-$1k rifles, that was to be expected.
Within the LR-308 and AP4 product lines, there were 3 different receiver heights.
They had a great design with the DPMS GII once the product development team and engineers were able to do a ground-up, clean-sheet design with that. One of their senior people kicked off the discussion this way, “How about we make something that actually works."
They had so many returns and guns that just didn’t run, that the design needed major work with full pyramid testing funded by the Remington/Freedom Group consortium.
They did excellent RDT&E work on the GII, then handed it over to DPMS/Remington production management and they monkey-humped it to trash. Ejection port doors wouldn’t open upon manually cycling the action, terrible pineapple quad rail handguards on several of the SKUs, CLGS 16” barrels on at least 2 of the SKUs, and an initial splash with marketing, followed by dropping the ball on it.
There have been whispering of a DPMS revival, but I haven’t seen it. They had a big half-off sale in 2019-2020 and then it was gone. Doors closed, bye bye. Shocked everyone.
A lot of companies used to rely on DPMS for parts, that didn’t want anyone knowing they were getting parts from DPMS.
In my experience owning and working on multiple samples from both companies, the ArmaLite Inc. rifles were just built better in every way. Barrels, receivers, LPKs, BCGs especially, the mid-length RET, proper buffering, and just everything about the ArmaLite Inc. rifles exceeded the quality and performance of the DPMS budget guns across the board.
I have no loyalty to either company, no relationships with either, just shelled out my own money for multiple samples from both. I have owned 6 different .308 and .260 Rem ARs. 1 was ArmaLite, 2 were DPMS factory rifles (.308 LR-308 and LR-260), 2 were GAP-built, and the latest is a Savage MSR-10 small frame receiver platform.
ArmaLite Inc. (rebranded Eagle Arms) was sold to new ownership, but before that, they introduced what they call the AR-10A that runs on SR-25 pattern mags. It’s harder now to find AR-10Bs that run on the M14 body mags, which were actually more reliable than the DPMS stuff.
The M14-bodied mags took a lot of flak, but they were actually great mags in the AR-10 platform. I’ve seen them run in various conditions in volume, with no malfs across several different rifles in the sub-arctic.
But the days of where you could land on a reliable DPMS AP4 for under $1k are a thing of the past and have been for a while.