Someone mentioned the bolt baffle on Savage .223s. In addition to the 6.5 CM 110 EP, I also have a Savage 12 in .223. My only complaint with it is it came with a 9-twist barrel, and I'm stuck with <69-grain bullets. The bolt baffle just shortens the bolt throw. I get the Savage haters, I'm just not one of them. If you like the way the 110 EP looks, I recommend laying hands on one.
Nothing about that rifle says "sow's ear" or cheap. Is it a custom rifle, nope, but you cannot buy a custom rifle for $1700 either. There are a ton of good youtube videos that I watched before I bought mine.
I bought it knowing it would likely have feed/eject issues, but also knew it would not cost me anything to resolve that issue. The other thing I'd point out is the 110 gets you the ability to change barrels/calibers with pre-fit barrels, so that .223 could easily be morphed into a 6, 6.5 or .308. Good luck regardless of what you end up with!
Need I say more?
BTW, the Savage design I have always liked (I'm not a Savage hater), it's the execution of the design in this day and age that leaves it less than desired for matches.
As to pre-fits, there's a lot of actions these days that have that capability (which used to be just Savage). Tikka, Howa, Origins, 737's...there's a lot of them that someone can order a
shouldered pre-fit barrel (without the barrel nut). The Origin actions are really what the Savage actions
should have become...
IMHO, Savage sat on their laurels for too long, or just didn't have a clue what they were sitting on. I lean towards the latter, because when they released their first Tactical Mag fed rifle, I asked them at SHOT, where they had the release, why they didn't use AICS magazines instead of a proprietary Savage magazine. You could see the confusion and lack of understanding on the BD guy's face. Totally clueless as to what was (and had been) going on in the community at the time.
They continue to produce, low cost, durable hunting rifles, that just about anyone can afford. They
can be cleaned up into a fairly reliable competition rifle, but I emphasize "fairly". At some point, fixing/tweaking a Savage rifle becomes a game of diminishing returns, and overall cost wise, the person would have been better off purchasing a better actioned platform.
And this is coming from someone that started with a Savage rifle, back when 6.5 Creedmoor was this "new fangled metric competition cartridge", and a barrel had to be ordered from Pac-Nor to screw onto a Savage. That rifle served me well, but had intermittent issues, and had to be mod'ed to accept AICS mags (PTG bottom metal fiasco), and got to the point where it just wasn't reliable enough for me. Back then, if the trigger malfunctioned, I had time to lift the bolt to recock. But course of fire stage times are
much shorter now than they were 10-15 years ago, so reliability has a much greater impact these days.
