Teal:
You are somewhat correct in that many competitive shooters are not concerned with looks but with what works for them. However, and I want to make it clear that I have not handled one of these guns, in most competitive shotgun shooting, light weight in a gun is NOT your friend. It makes it easier to mispoint the gun, harder to maintain a smooth swing and follow through which is critical in all shotgun shooting but especially in competitition because the difference between winning and "glad you came, try harder next week" is often just one or two targets, and, perhaps as important a reason as any, the shooter has to absorb more recoil. Most competition guns TEND to be somewhat heavier with somewhat longer barrels than normal hunting guns to help with the above problems. Even many clays guns now have quite long barrels on them. Same thing happened to skeet shooting. Used to be the standard skeet barrel was about 26 inches, now it is probably more like 30 and some 32s. What this long lead in boils down to is that if the Cynergy doesn't sell to hunters where the carrying advantages of ltwt offset the shooting disadvantages, it is sunk.
Browning seems to have a history of listening to the designers or someone, and not the marketing people (or at least not the good ones <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />) and coming out with quite a few shotgun designs over the last 25 years that don't turn people on. It would have been relatively easy to make the Cynergy more attractive, instead, they chose to accentuate its differences. A poor decision IMO. Time will tell.
