Clif,
I appreciate fine hand craftsmanship at as well as anyone here, maybe more than most. But overwelmingly more often than not, hand work in guns is done poorly or mediocrely.

It'd be interesting to see a traditional type sidelock designed on a total design/mfr system like CATIA and manufactured by machining the stock head. I wonder how much hand fitting of the stock head could be avoided. Given what I've seen on airplane design and mfr, I'd say its just a matter of scale and that a complex traditional sidelock stock head could be fully machined to fit if the metal was made the same way.