Okay, so here's the range report.
The girlfriend and I took the rifle out to the Abbotsford Fish & Game range for a trial run yesterday. Unbeknownst to me, BC Corrections is running a training program there for a couple weeks so we couldn't use the long range - we had to move over to the 65m range. So we did most of the testing at 50m.
Now I'm by no means a crack shot or any kind of AR expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but I've managed to be more accurate with this rifle than with anything I've shot before.
We used targets with 1/2" grid marks, and Federal American Eagle XM223 55gr FMJ from the big green 1000 round ammo can. Once we got the sights roughed in, my best group was about 1", with most averaging 1.25 - 1.5". Hers ranged from 1.5 - 2", having never shot before. I figure that works out to about 2-3 MOA from inexperienced shooters using irons.
Here are some of our better targets. I am the black circles; she is the black triangles. All the red marked holes out away from the center are from the attempted sighting-in.
A couple things about the rifle: firstly I had about five feeding failures within the first 20 or so rounds, (as well as the last-shot-hold-open wasn't working) which I was pretty upset about until I realized that in my initial cleaning and re-oiling I hadn't oiled the BCG in the right place on the rails and the bolt was short-stroking and missing the back of the cartridge casing (First AR). Once I gave her some more oil it performed without a hiccup for the remainder of 100 rounds.
Rounds mangled:
Secondly it took a while to set up the irons because the handguard rail didn't seem to have been tightened fully, and the recoil vs. the wooden benchrest made it twist slightly to the right side. A quick trip to the car toolkit and it was tightened back perfectly in line with the rails on the upper, and didn't move again after. Maybe in the haste of trying to get these things out the door somebody missed tightening this one.
All in all for what I paid I'm extremely satisfied.
PS: as for some of the points/questions raised above - the rifle seems to show up as being more 'grey' in the pictures than in real life, perhaps because of the flash? I'm looking at it right now and the lower anodizing looks nearly identical to the trigger hammer inside it, or the plastic buttstock in colour. It is definitely NOT as grey as it looks in the pictures. Also the railed hand guard looks the same colour as the rest, although the finish is a bit... rougher? I.e. more like a very very fine sandpaper vs the smoothness of the rest. Maybe that resulted in a lighter look under the camera's flash?
And of course I'd prefer the tightening system to look like Troy's, but the Troy ones seem to start at a third the cost of this whole rifle... so I'm perfectly fine with this if that's what it takes to make it affordable. I don't know about any of you but a $3000 AR is a little out of my range for something that's effectively just a range gun.