Actually, what I've noticed is that the rifle need not be a CRF design to be "practical and stone nuts reliable."
What I've come to appreciate are other features which are usually found on such rifles.
First of all, almost all of "rifle reliability problems" have occured under only certain hunting conditions that I suspect aren't encountered by alot of hunters.
My favorite hunting area by far, is a very unusual area with much different hunting conditions than most encounter.
It can be very dusty driving around off road in my very open Jeep. Much of this dust is very fine and has a habit of finding it's way into a rifle's action. Since my hunts run 3-4 weeks of this, it can easily accumulate in the action.
Second, all of my good bucks had to be taken on the run, ducking a dodging through cover. The rifle needs to feed and eject with complete reliability.
Last of all, I hate having to clean the insides of my rifle daliy or close to it. I've got lot of other camp chores to do at the end of the day, and I'm often exhausted from a combination of off roading, eating dust and hunting on foot over very unstable desert ground.
While it is true that the military does well with the Remington 700 based sniper rifles, I simply don't follow their constant maintenance and testing procedures. It's not practical for me.
The rifles/action that I've found completely reliable are my old tang safety Ruger, which is a push feed action BTW, my M70 Classic and my M98 Mauser. All of them have claw style extractors, all of them have open trigger designs for easy cleaning, and all of them have safeties which don't allow the fine dust to gum them up. And they all have bolt stops which don't jam open, which then means you'll have the bolt out of the rifle the one one time you need to get another round into the chamber in a hurry to hit that buck. E
