Jack, an old gent like you should be sitting by the fire, dreaming up more reasons why ST's are better than DT's--rather than out there in the cold, where you might frostbite your fingers or have a coronary. And I understand that as one ages, circulation problems increase, causing one to feel the cold more--especially in one's extremities. Yet another reason to wait for warmer weather--and shoot the more reliable and more sensible DT.
If you take a company like Merkel--which seems to make more sxs than OU's (or at least exports more sxs to this country, by a healthy margin)--then the price thing does a flipflop. Merkel sxs are a good bit less expensive than the OU's.
Back when the Cynergy came out, I had a chance to ask the Browning people how come they didn't have Miroku making sxs for them any more. The response was that all the employees who had worked on sxs had retired. The Ruger experience with the GL shows that while it might not be any more difficult from a technological viewpoint to produce sxs when you're already producing OU's, the process is very different. And even with guns that are largely machine-made, you still have to set up the machining and have the people that know the process. When you start from scratch (as Ruger did) and are looking at a much smaller volume than on OU production, then you have to factor in startup costs--which have to be recouped in the price of a relatively small number (in comparison to OU volume) of units produced.
