Occaisionally I get a chance to shoot with a young S&W engineer. He told me S&W just could not compete with the Italian imports for the Schofield market. S&W actually needed to further RAISE the price of their Schofield to make it profitable. With Italian imports selling for about half as much, there was no way they could do that.
CNC machining has been around for a long time now. It is not the end all and be all of cost control in modern manufacturing. There is a lot more involved than that. Italian gunmakers use CNC equipment too. But Italian labor is cheaper than American labor.
One of the greatest costs of any modern manufactured product is something loosely called 'manufacturability'. If it's hard to make, it costs more. If it's easy to make, it costs less. Colt SAA, S&W Schofield are quintessential 19th century designs. They were hard to make but the extensive hand fitting required to assemble them was relatively inexpensive. Sam Colt's and Oliver Winchester's employees probably lived in tenements in Hartford and New Haven. Thankfully, modern industrial employees don't have to live in such conditions anymore. (Yet). But if you pay employees a living wage, the cost of hand fitting of parts goes up disproportionally with the rest of the manufacturing costs.
CNC equipment making parts designed in the 19th century is not much of a cost saver. As a matter of fact, it's dumb, and a waste of equipment. But we insist our guns be true to the originals and that's the only way to do it.
The real genius of Ruger is that they completely redesigned conventional looking firearms, like the Blackhawk and the Vaquero, with modern technology in mind, not 19th century technology. A lot of people complain that Vaqueros are not very authentic, and when you take one apart and compare the parts to a SAA's parts there's no denying it. But when you caompare the cost of stamping out a cylinder stop for a Vaquero to the cost of machining a bolt for a SAA (analogous parts), there is just no comparison. And then top that off with the fact that the RUger part just pops in place with no hand fitting while the Colt part needs special hand fitting, it's no wonder that RUger is blowing away th competition.
I have no doubt that if they wanted to Ruger could make a cost effective likeness of the Schofield. But no purists would buy it.
Smith and Wesson's bread and butter is Double Action revolvers. These are mature products and nobody makes them better. Starting all over again from scratch with faded blueprints from the 19th century and nobody alive today who remembers the tricks to assembling them was a loosing propostion from the start, unless customers were willing to pay for it. S&W's customers were not. It will be interesting to see how Hartford Armory fares, attempting to make a 19th Century design today but with updated technology. They are not going to be cheap.