I really don't care (or understand) why so many people buy them. There's a reason why there is an entire cottage industry built around bolt pins, extractor replacements, and of course the magnificent trigger. Very accurate rifles indeed, but for me the last straw is a safety that won't lock the bolt. The small block Chevy works fine as is, the 700 does not.
I've probably owned close to 100 rifles in the Remington 700 family over the past 50 years, still have 55, and have never had a problem with any of them. A small percentage of a very large number may be a meaningful number to some people, but it remains a very small percentage of the entire production run. Remington may look at their error rate and after comparing that number to the number of 700s produced, find that the error rate is too small to be worth fixing. I would assume that cost to benefit analysis is taught in operations 101 in every MBA program in America.
