Thanks for the responses, guys!
Pettifogger, Coffinmaker--sounds like it might be a matter of the individual specimen rather than the maker? Most of my past experience with repros was with Uberti, but I had five or six Piettas over the years (and a couple ASMs, when they were the only Walkers I could find).
Soft parts was always my pet peeve. My "original" franken-dragoon went 5,000 rounds without parts failures, but the repro's parts would be worn out before then. (Of course, a hammer for the dragoon cost as much as I paid for the repros. . . .)
Long Johns Wolf, in the (let's see. . . put-down-six-and-carry-two. . . ) 37 years I've been shooting c&b revolvers (oh man, I'm getting old), I've seen a total of _2_ Centaures. One was the donor gun for my franken-1860 (some yayhoo blew the cylinder with a charge of white powder, but the bolt and backstrap were intact). The other was the match pistol of a guy who used to regularly out-shoot me. It had a lot of features to recommend it, but I know he put some work into tuning it. Heat-treatment of the internals was spot-on, but he had the cylinder reamed to take a larger ball, and did some barrel work. I'll definitely keep an eye out for one though--thanks for the reminder!