I have spoken to them and when a 1911 is built correctly it is extremely trouble free.
It all comes down to everything being held to a strict specification. The 1911 of today suffers from the same issue that plagues a lot of IBM compaitble PC's, and that is; none of them (with the exception of the Taurus) are 100% built by one builder.
The original military 1911 actually required very little hand fitting of parts, and it was more than sufficiently reliable. That's because the US Military's requirements for holding spec bordered on oppressive.
When I worked on surplus 1911's, we had several thousand that needed re-finishing. All were stripped of parts, all the parts were thrown into bins with no concern about keeping the parts with the original gun (something I protested, but I lost that protest). Then guns were randomly assembled form bins of parts. The only part that gave us consistent problems was the safety; everything else just dropped in, and the guns worked perfectly. Really quite amazing when you think about it.
But we don't have that kind of uniformity today. That's why so many parts are made oversized and now require so much hand fitting.
So in some ways, the 1911 is better than ever, but in other ways the design has regressed.
So it's harder to be a military armorer for 1911's today than it was in WW II.
My cousin said he still would rather work in 1911's all day long than M9's. And he had a rather passionate hatred for the Sig 228. The 228 is a great pistol, unitl you tear the lower down; then you think it was designed by a mad man.
