Originally Posted by
JonInWA
I have absolutely no actual knowledge to back this assertion, but I've long suspected that SIG had made a conscious corporate decision to put up with Matt McLearn's concept (exceptional build quality, exceptional niche components) for only so long, essentially long enough to establish the cred of the gun, treating it as a sort of niche loss-leader profit-margin wise, and then coast on the rep while diminishing the costs-basically by going to mid-quality MIM and decreasing the name-quality components used...A plethora of stylistic/aesthetic options quickly replaced the high quality, but limited numbers of models. To the best of my knowledge, this started around 2007, and quickly accelerated. While the parts quality probably isn't horrible, it's nowhere close to the initial concept from 2004-2006.