I believe in a Forgotten Weapons episode, Ian claimed that the hand-built 2000 prototypes were quite nice, then they set up the production line, and whatever changes they had to make for that process made it awful.
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That would be my guess too.
My guess is, the reason we didn't see Hudson get bought before is a mixture of problems. One poor QC made the gun a non-starter and thus no one could tell if the commercial success would be there. Second, when Hudson started rolling downhill, I'm gonna guess they fielded a few phonecalls from interested parties, who probably noped out after seeing some of the digits. With a 10-million plus deficit apparent from the bankruptcy filings, that was too rich for anyone to want to buy.
My prediction? During bankruptcy there will be a very short auction for the Hudson IP, it'll include just a few players, it'll go for pennies on the start-up dollars. We'll see a new version of Hudson every five years for the next twenty years as someone tries to get it rolling again with too much money invested. One of the five versions won't suck, but will have to deal with the suck of the previous generations such that it will never make it.
Meanwhile, the big companies have learned something from it and we'll get more steel framed or steel inserted, heavier, guns.