The veneration of age for its own sake is not new. Colonel Hawker urged younng shots to stick to flintlocks to improve their follow through. A cartoon in a 19th century magazine shows a gentleman with an open breech loader and two game keepers asking mockingly "how is he going to shoot now that he went and bruck up his gun!" A joke at the expense of the then new breech loader.
If memory serves, Greener, Jr. had a major falling out with Greener, Sr. over whether the radical notion of internal hammers was a fad or a legitimate evolution in gun design. I would hazard a guess that the evolution from external to internal hammers, and all the related action design issues that went along with that evolution (not to mention developing new ejector and single trigger designs), was a bigger issue for gunmakers in the late 1800s than the question of whether to use machined parts to build actions.
(If anyone is determined to discover the absolute best in craftsmanship and find the holy grail I suspect it might involve a trip across the channel to Germany or its close neighbors.)
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