The much repeated BS about Colt "turning its back" on the regular consumer is just that- BS.
No company, Colt or anybody else, should be expected to continue manufacturing non-profitable product lines because a segment of its customer base feels that company owes it to them.
Colt had limited resources & made a business decision to allocate those resources toward products that WERE profitable.
They didn't do that just to poke you in the eye.
Had you & others been buying those discontinued revolvers in sufficient numbers to justify Colt keeping them in production, you can bet those guns would still be in the catalog.
You go start up a business manufacturing red widgets & blue widgets.
You'll have the resources to build a finite number of widgets in total.
You start out making equal numbers, 50% red, 50% blue.
In a couple years you notice that red widgets are outselling blue widgets 100 to 1.
You can't keep up with red widget orders, while blue widgets are stacking up on shelves waiting for orders to come in.
The blue widget orders are intermittent, but operating expenses are constant.
You're a for-profit business, you have to not only pay your bills or go under, but make a profit, or there's no point in bothering to run the biz.
Gee. Tough decision there.
But, you make that tough decision, and you swing all available resources into expanding production of red widgets, and you drop the blues.
Sales increase exponentially, you stay afloat, you actually make money, and you simply tell those few people now deciding they want blue widgets "Sorry, had to move on."
The Blue Widget Brigade, completely ignoring the realities of the manufacturing world, may hate you forever for "abandoning" them, but business IS, after all, BUSINESS.
And you REMAIN in business.
Buy the Cobra or don't, but this unfounded resentment against Colt for doing what it had to do to survive is nothing but idiotic.
Denis