Practical or Retarded?

[PA PATRIOT]

Had a new group of shooters at the club last week who wanted to join the Military Rifle matches and were sighting the rifles in when I noticed all eight AR builds were all identical to each other. So I had to ask how they set up their rifles and got a surprising answer, first all were using a 16" PSA carbine gas length barrels, Semi-Auto carriers, Standard carbine springs and Carbine buffers. When I asked why such a build the leader of the group stated it was to ensure that the rifles would function with any steel cased ammo as that is all they could afford to buy in bulk and brass cased ammunition most likely would never be used.

So is this sound thinking if the owner was only ever going to run steel cased Wolf or Tula out of a recreational rifle or would such a set up batter its self over the long haul. For what it was worth I fired one of the guns and it did not appear to have excessive bolt velocity/recoil and function and ejection seemed normal enough.