BTP: Didn't see that coming!
Well, nobody else did either.
But it's the situation now and we have to deal with it. I find myself shooting 30-06 and 7.62X39 much more than I do .308 these days. Kind of weird if you think about the situation ten years ago, but it's reality now. Hopefully another glut of .308 will be found and imported or shooters will make such a stink about not having any .308 ammo for their rifles that someone will get smart and start ammo production on it sometime soon. They'd clean up if they did that. If I had the money, I'd do it myself as I know for a fact it would sell.
Not so much for the caliber, but for the carbine (tarted up a bit). I sold the 5.45 & bought a 5.56. I think 5.45 will soon be difficult to acquire.
Well, actually I haven't had very good luck with .223 AK carbines.
I bought the BGB in 2003 and it said in there that you hadn't tested a .223 AK yet, but the BGB said that the AK-74 looked pretty good for a carbine in 5.45 secondary to the features that it had and that getting one in .223 might be a good idea (to paraphrase the BGB). I had thought the same thing myself when looking at them at gun shows and gun shops and I couldn't afford an AR-15, so I bought a Romanian AK SAR in .223 and tried it out.
It was the biggest piece of junk ever made, I hated it.
Failures to feed, failures to extract, doubles coupled with a failure to feed. When I did manage to get it to fire, it was actually pretty accurate for an AK, the problem was just the way it would continue to malfunction over and over again. There were a few times that I managed to get through a full mag, but for the most part that wasn't the case.
I'm not going to pretend that I'm a gunsmith (I know how to change grips, springs and some parts and I know how to take them apart enough to know how to clean it, but that's about it), so I took it in three different times and each time it kept malfunctioning no matter what was replaced on it. Eventually I sold it to a friend who was a part time kitchen gunsmith for half price and I got rid of it. He didn't get it working either and he used the parts for some other guns that he had.
I can't blame you for it as I would've bought the gun anyway and besides, you didn't make it and you hadn't even tested it yet yourself as of that printing. But that was the last time I even thought about getting a Romanian AK in .223.
On the other hand, the 5.45 AK-74's that I've seen have seemed to work alot better (a couple friends have them). Maybe I just just got a lemon of a gun and maybe most of the other .223 AK's out there are okay, but I wouldn't buy one with my own money unless in was a Robinson Arms AK or something from a custom shop that had been tested extensively.
You're probably right about 5.45 ammo, but it's available right now for pretty cheap, so if someone were to buy a 5.45 rifle, then they would hopefully be smart enough to grab onto as much ammunition as they could afford right now before it goes up in price or before they quit importing it.