It's a very practical, useful and versatile round offered in a wide array of action types. In the '80s the .308 got a lot of bad word-of-mouth which puzzled me at the time. A number of customers complained about hunting failures with the round, as well as lots of jams in semi-autos.
I had a lot of Rem. semis in for jamming for a while, and guys with sad stories about lost deer. At first I wrote the lost game tales up as being due to many hunters lack of ability to accurately estimate range; trying to dump a moose across a pond or clear-cut 400 yards wide, thinking it was under 200, that sort of thing.
I was never a fan of the Rem autos, having to replace lots of those tiny extractors each year and handle other problems they should never have had, so didn't worry much about the jamming stories until they became epidemic. Guys were complaining their .308s didn't 'kill as well' as their old 30-30s.
I took boxes of all the then-current commercial .308 ammo brands to the pit with my chronograph and was surprised to find huge variations between published velocities and reality. Many were running a full 200 fps slower than the manufacturers claimed, in both 150 and 180 grain loads. I tried several different bolt rifles with 22 and 24" barrels, got the expected variations due to barrel length but the loads all fell far short of the advertised specs, some down to 30-30 velocities.
Eventually another chap in the trade suggested that thousands of mil. surplus foreign arms had been imported and rechambered in .308 during that period and the ammo manufacturers had quietly dropped the pressure levels in their loads in self-defence, not wanting any part of possible liability claims due to feeble actions. Made sense. They had done the same with things like 7X57 ammo during periods of large surplus imports of that caliber and other similar foreign offerings.
All the semis that came in because they baulked on the undernourished factory loadings of the time functioned fine when treated to ammo hand loaded to published factory specs.
I haven't chrono'd .308 loads in about 25 years, and I presume the modern stuff is back up to spec, but that period of a few years with mild factory loadings did a lot of unjustified damage to the reputation of a fine little round. Every now and then I still hear an old-timer telling someone the .308 won't kill chipmunks. ;-) Nonsense, of course.
