It’s laughable when so many folks tout the virtues of the lower priced rifle against custom rifles - absolutely forgetting a reality of economics. While the reverse is not true, those of us who can afford custom rifles can also afford the cheap ones - so we’ve seen the difference first hand. Many of us started with cheap factory rifles, found them lacking - because they are - and only spent the extra money on higher priced models, or custom rifles, to close those inefficiencies we saw first hand.
My first indoor rifle was a borrowed Winny 52, followed by another borrowed aperture sighted Annie. My club-mates wouldn’t let me compete with any of the rifles I owned, because they weren’t competitive. The first one I purchased was a Vostok Ural, because I couldn’t afford an Annie or Winny. Even as an entry level rifle in the same league as the other precision built, purpose designed rifles, it still only let me hang with the group, not really compete.
Smallbore indoor - a few targets pictured above by other shooters/members - uses a 10 ring a bit smaller diameter than a pencil eraser and a DOT for the X which is about the size of a dot a mechanical pencil would make if dropped vertically on the page. I practiced a lot with my factory/standard/cheap rifles in those early days, doing a lot of wood working and bondo work to make a cheap rifle FEEL like a 3/4 position rifle. When you take off the shooting jacket and start talking about stuff like Rimfire silhouette, a 452/455 can hang, but you won’t see a Marlin semi-auto on a firing line outside of a local club level match. The entire premise is just silly.
Horses for courses - I like my Papoose rifles for camping and kayaking, that’s about it. The Ruger 10/22 takedown is proving to be more reliable, better mags, better aftermarket, and more accurate, however. For NRL-22 matches, I have a worked over Savage Mark II, and wish every match it was a Voodoo or 40x. If our local smallbore club is still running when my boy gets old enough, he’ll be shooting an Annie or Win 52. But his Marlin 60 works great for him (at 4yoa) for water bottles at 50yrds, standing off of sticks.