Ah yes, the good old days, when IPSC was relevant
I've seen videos from the old days. "Practical" shooting was never "practical". And any attempts at making it more relevant (IDPA) just get more ridiculous.
Back in the IPSC days before all the "race" guns became the standard
Since the OP is going to have to spend several thousand dollars to have a custom gunsmith recreate one of the original IPSC guns, I'd say that's pretty good evidence that "race" guns have been popular all along.
There are compensated, dot sighted, open guns now...sure. But the guy who shows up with a box stock Glock or 1911 isn't competing against those. And open class isn't even the most popular division, so I'd hardly call open guns the "standard".
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Competitive shooting is a sport, nothing more or less. As soon as you test skills against a timer and publish a ranking after the match, all practicality goes out the window because people want to win. It's the nature of the beast. If it's gonna be practical, there needs to be no timers and no rankings and no divisions.
Then it'll just be practice. But as soon as guys get together to practice shooting they're gonna want to know who's more accurate (scoring) and who's faster (timers) and then argue about how gear and calibers effected their shooting (power factors and divisions). Take away everything that makes competitive shooting impractical and within a year it'll have recreated itself.
