MtMuley;
I will try and answer your questions based on my experience. I have just retired from 30 years in law enforcement. During that career I was a sniper on the swat team, competition shooter, certified firearms instructor, department armour, and I had a part time gunsmithing shop where I worked on mostly rifles and built custom rifles.
Due to my positions concerning firearms in my dept. I read appox. 20-40 articles, mags, publications every month dealing with firearms. In my positions I was able to get numerous articles concerning & pertaining to firearm failures or problems that the average person would find difficult to obtain.
As a result of this above experience, I am aware of numerous problems that are related to the trigger mechanism of remington rifles. Due to this information, I do not like or trust the Remington trigger-safety mechanism as I do other brands of firearms. I lost count long ago of how many times I saw information, or seen for myself, a Remington having a accidental discharge due to a faulty system, that was tested and proven to be faulty. Lets face it, any mechanical device can fail at any time, but Remington triggers-safety have too high of a rate of failure for me to trust them.
You are right about alot of custom builders using the Rem. action to build custom accurate rifles. Most of the builders using them are basing their reputation on building a rifle for outstanding accuracy more then anything else. The reason for this is because the Remington action is a oblong cylinder with a removable recoil lug plate that fits inbetween the barrel and action. This makes it very easy, less set up time, to chuck this action into a lathe and blueprint it for accuracy while turning down the lug recess, face, truing up the threads ect! In other words, the gunsmith saves alot of time on using the Rem. action over many others. Time is money to them.
I also appreciate a fine custom rifle, and I am not a very big lover of Sny. stocks, they are cold and ugly, I prefer to use a select grade of English or Claro wanut on my own stocks, most customers want the plastic instead. As for fine bluing, Rem. is only average in that dept. Several other brands use a higher grit of polish resulting in a far better finish job.
yes, you are right about me having a biased opinion concerning some aspects of the Remington rifle, I feel that I have a very good reason to have that opinion, I value my life and will not use a product that I feel is not made to the standards that it should be. If others feel different about using a item that could be sub-standard, that is their choice also.
RELH