I get confused with terms like "fighting rifle class".
there remains a difference in the ~1moa fighting rifles and sub-MOA precision AR’s.
It’s really pretty simple. There are AR’s on the civilian market which are made to the same specifications as select fire military rifles. They tend to over-lean towards durability and reliability, and don’t focus as much on raw accuracy. The cheapest of these will be 1.5-2moa rifles, the best of them, FN, DD, LMT, Larue, Knight’s, etc will be 1moa rifles, maybe up to 1.5moa on bad days, but balanced with those strokes of brilliance here and there printing 3/4moa. Then there are precision built rifles, which have the same level of reliability, and largely similar durability, but focused enhancements in the parts of the rifle which make it shoot small. These are going to be reliably under 1moa, and often sneaking into half MOA and even under half for the right shooters in the right conditions. Not many folks produce these, GAP and Dtech being two I know who do so, religiously. White Oak, Compass Lake, JP, Seekins, all make rifles which fall nearer to the precision built AR than to the high class fighting rifle.
If I were a war fighter, shooting at 18”x30” torso’s as my criteria for success, I wouldn’t sweat the difference between a 1/2” rifle and a 1” rifle. I would, however, want to know, if I took a hard landing on my rifle, it would keep making with the umpop pop after. I might give up the advantage of a free float handguard in trade for peace of mind that I could slam the rifle onto a rock or tree stump or ruck a hundred times, or a thousand times, without ever breaking loose. In the civilian world, however, the consequences are lower. I can come home after a match and check screws, replace anything broken or damaged, and ensure my rifle doesn’t go two weeks without cleaning after shooting in a dust storm, or taking a dip in a swamp. But I also might play games or pursue animals which need a higher standard for precision.
In the same world, a shooter who wants precision on a budget can build or have built an AR which has the critical trappings of a high dollar, custom gunsmith AR, and still attain perfect reliability, with sub-MOA accuracy. $250-400 on a barrel, $200-300 on a trigger, then a few extra minutes of time mating the extension to the receiver, and any free float AR can be exceptionally accurate. And this, at a fraction of the cost of a custom gunsmith built precision AR, or even less so than many of these top brand fighting AR’s. It may not be as durable as the fighting AR’s, but almost so, and it may not be as accurate as the precision AR’s, but almost so, and it’s inexpensive enough to build two of them for the price of either of the others.
So, as they say, Horses for Courses. There’s a big difference between a VERY accurate AR built to defend freedom, and a VERY accurate AR built to be accurate.