All the raving, frothing opinions on this site have made it a useless place to get advice on firearms, as the haters will scream one way, while the happy owners shrug and mumble the other way. At the end of the day, the information is useless. It's a microcosm of the species; a whole lot of scrambling, discussion and conflict, but it is largely no more meaningful than the sound of rain falling.
I'm not a fan of either brand loyalty or brand animosity, but the bolded section highlights what I find to be a common false dichotomy on gun forums.
A lot of people separate opinions into "happy owners" and "haters". This particularly happens with cheaper guns.
There are those two groups. There are also unhappy owners, indifferent owners, indifferent non-owners, people with lots of experience who don't like guns based on legitimate information, and so on.
Not every criticism is unwarranted brand bashing. Some companies genuinely put out inferior products. That is not to say that every single "brand X" thread should be a flame fest but at the same time, if there is a discussion about the merits of a given gun, I think it's pretty reasonable to say "brand X has a history of product recalls" or "brand X has become notorious for failure Y".
I couldn't count the number of times I've been called a "hater" and my descriptions of problems with various guns have been characterized as "spewing" by people who are happy with their guns. Or the number of times people have said something along the lines of "do you own one? Then you don't know, so #### off" despite the fact that while I don't own one I have had to fix the same issue on five of them for different people, say. Or I happen to know that the manufacturer of a given item had a major problem with porosity of welds on a particular item because I was there when it was discovered, or the person who figured out the issue is a friend of mine, and I know the manufacturer calculated the cost of the fix against the cost of the small number of returns they were getting, and decided to do nothing, gambling on the fact that most people don't shoot enough to encounter the problem.
So while I agree that brand loyalty and brand animosity are both stupid, there's also being informed about different manufacturers, as well as varying levels of acceptance when it comes to quality. For example, I buy Norinco 1911s because I have the facilities to correct all their issues. As a result I am pretty tolerant of lousy fitting and nonexistent QC. If I didn't and I had to run them straight out of the box, I wouldn't buy them. I understand having different levels of quality tolerance and not everyone has to have the same values. Just remember that not all criticism is from people who just happen to prefer a different brand, and not everybody builds guns to the same standard.
