Don't listen to gear snobs who have likely never handled one. Just sounds like the .460 Weatherby experts all over. If they were right then the Ruger American would never hand taken off.
The are great little inexpensive handguns that are well finished with deep even bluing and handle and shoot very well.
I have played with a couple of them, one with the 4 inch barrel and the other with the 6 inch barrel, both with the .22 Magnum cylinder which is additional for something like $28. Because I had a paid of them, I decided to chronograph them with the same ammo to determine variance in velocity with the 2 inch variance in barrels and with both cylinders.
The ammo I had on hand consisted of the Remington Thunderbolt .22LR Hi Speed load and the Winchester .22 Magnum Super X load rated at 1910fps in a rifle of some sort. I began with the 4" barrel and then the 6" version with the following results with the Oehler 35P set up about 12 feet away as I was also chronographing rifles that day. The following is a full cylinder of 6 rounds for each load and gun.
4 Inch @ .22LR = 756fps
6 Inch @ .22LR = 796fps for 20fps per inch difference
4 Inch @ .22Mag = 1238fps
6 Inch @ .22Mag = 1077fps a loss of 80fps per inch
In hindsight, I would like to have swapped out the cylinders for each and chronographed again because any variation in the cylinders and forcing cones and barrels could record different results again. It would also show if there is any variation in the mass produced cylinders per gun or at least in these 2 samples.
I saw something similar once before when I owned a Ruger GP100 with 6 inch barrel and found a mate had the same gun with 4 inch barrel. In that case, using my handloads in each, there was only 20fps difference favoring the longer barrel and at that time, I felt the longer barrel wasn't earning its keep for only 10fps per inch.
