Not going to argue john rigby makes a work of functional art, but globally how many rifles do they sell a year? I'm guessing a week of sales from just one of the mid tier rifle companies puts more rifles in hands than rigby.
In one of your later posts you talk about playing with a shorter barrel 7 rem mag in the 80s. I'll raise you one, in the 2010s a local smith used to sell takeoff and surplus barrels for pennies on the dollar. At one point we cut down from 26 a 7 rum, a 7 rem mag and a 7 wsm (they were savage barrels and 25 to 50$, so we also did a 270 wsm that we did exhaustive testing on as well as 243 and a 22 250). There certainly is a point where muzzle blast gets annoying and there are points for all cartridges that velocity drops off significantly. However, there are sweet spots that a growing number of us are gravitating towards.
Buddy traded out a rifle that came 24 inches with a break in 6.5 creedmore for a 21 inch 6.5 prc with a can. The can plus barrel is the same as his creedmore but significantly quite as well as a slight bump in performance for the same oal length rifle. Not all trends are totally baseless, shorter barrel with can works for a lot of guys.
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