"Gun Tests" have not endeared themselves to a lot of gun companies.
No, they haven't. That's why I read them. Most of us know how to think or ourselves, too, and that includes evaluating their opinions and deciding what we think of them (which, BTW, they encourage).
Gun companies want every review to be like American Rifleman, but of course we all know those are an absolute joke. It's funny to look at how they tout the latest POS as if it's the best gun ever. Maybe the most negative thing I've read lately in an AR review is that the 887 "doesn't handle quite like an 870", which I translated in my mind to, "handles like a waterlogged fencepost." I went to the store, picked one up and indeed, it handles like a waterlogged fencepost.
Without Gun Tests' perspective, I'd have little to go on when figuring out what guns to look at, except for the opinions of other people with their own prejudices and far less knowledge of the big picture.
OTOH I've found that people who FIX guns also have a unique and important perspective, which GT doesn't really have. What's inside does count.
WRT the bottom-eject, I think that Remington would have done better to just build a really nice gun with a more conventional design, for the reasons you list, and also because they haven't been blown away in the marketplace by whiz-bang guns. They've been blown away in the marketplace by guns designed and built with far greater attention to detail than Remington seems capable of.
Applying the efforts they put into the 105 CTi to a gun with 1100-style handling, but with the refinement they never in 4 decades bothered to put into the 1100, would have likely produced better results. That would have required Remington to take a hard look at WHY they lost their market dominance, and what they could do better. I sincerely doubt their management is capable of that, and it seems all they do is try to bring new designs to the market before they're ready, and rely on marketing to talk them up. Most of them fall flat.
