Hey Coffinmaker,
I'd heard that folks had been asking about me. Sorry about the hiatus. I was getting frustrated with Youtube's censoriousness of gun content, which had been making me less enthusiastic about making videos, which had the unintended consequence of my not reloading and shooting in a while, which led to my not paying as much attention to firearms and the forums as I used to. It did have one benefit; when I wasn't spending so much time messing with firearms and perusing the forums, I was less likely to notice specimens for sale on the forums, and my bank account is grateful.
But one cannot stay away forever, and I continue to get comments and questions on my videos that I answer, which led me to direct the OP here.
I notice little details on firearms that a lot of folks miss, and I can get obsessed with them. I struggle not to them bug me, but when a clone-maker deviates considerably from the original in appearance, especially when it doesn't need to, I tend to fixate on that. So when the Standard first debuted, I noticed immediately that the contour of the front of the topstrap looked "wrong". Its arc was unique to Standard, supporting Standard's assertion that its single actions were 100% their own development and had nothing to do with USFA. And then my inspection of the rest of the parts appeared to support that in some areas but not in others. This was before anyone offered anything beyond anecdotal evidence that some USFA tooling went to Standard. I have still not seen anything beyond this anecdotal evidence, so the dimensional differences still capture my attention more than they probably should. And I still fail to see how the moving of CNC machinery would have much effect on the final shaping of some of the parts, but I'll have to defer to an expert on that. It just doesn't make intuitive sense to me, given my understanding of how CNC machining is supposed to work.
This attention to detail trait of mine can be a real curse. I don't like the Pietta GWII for what you and most others would consider to be a ridiculously nit-picky reason. Their trigger guards have no bevels at the top, and that just bugs me. A lot. 3rd Gen. Colts don't have them either, so Pietta's version shouldn't bother me. But it does...A lot... Because they're supposed to be copies of 1st Gen Colts. So why can't they make the trigger guards look right? Yeah, I know...nit-picky...