While I good AK is generally considered to be more durable and rugged than an AR, how does a mini 14/30 stack up between these two?
I've had better luck with AR's and AK's than Mini's.
To be fair I haven't owned one of the new Mini 14's, just the older type.
On the Mini's that I've owned and fired the feeding was usually so-so (often depending on what mag and ammo was used), the ejection fantastic in that it send brass into friggin' orbit and the groups were generally okay.
AK's had the Mini beat on surviving neglect and price of ammo and the AR had it beat in accuracy. So it had that middle child thing going on.
Mags : The main problem I've had and seen in just about every Mini I've run across is feeding. Some of that might have been the fault of the mags that we were forced to use. Back in the 70's, 80's and 90's Ruger wouldn't sell their 20 rd mags to just any law abiding citizen, they had to be law enforcement.
Since it was just a company policy and nothing legal saying that they couldn't be bought and sold by anyone you'd see those Ruger LE mags floating around gun shows. I'm guessing cops or some gun stores that had an agreement with them not to sell to anyone but LE would flip them and make some money on them. Those mags worked fairly well. My dad had 5 back then.
Most of the other mags made for the Ruger Mini-14 by other companies did not work well. Fed Ord was an exception, those worked. Most of the others were horrible. Many shooters today might forget the mangled pieces of dung that we had to use to feed our rifles with back then.
Accuracy and optics : As far as accuracy went Mini's seemed all over the place. Most of the ones I've seen were good enough for field use, especially if you found a load that it especially liked. I've ran across a few that weren't that great from the factory that customers were sending back. That is the exception though. Most did okay.
The AR crowd will just generally all bag on the Mini-14 because that's an area that most AR's will do pretty well in. The irons on the AR-15 are better in every way and it's easy to use any red dot or scope you want. In contrast the Mini-14's sights are okay and it isn't as easy to mount optics.
Ammo : Most AK's can and will shoot anything. This is an area that the AK is going to do the best in since 7.62x39 has been one of the least expensive to shoot.
Price : Back in the late 80's you could buy a Mini-14 for $225 and AR's were about twice that. Now that Mini's are $800 and AR's can be had for $450 it seems like their target audience are those shooters that like wooden stocks and those stuck in states where they can't own evil black rifles.