Palmetto State Armory AR’s - I’m impressed

[ViniVidivici]

I'm happy with the PSA BCG in one of my guns I ran this weekend that ran like a sewing machine, as usual.

[Diamondback]

One other thing to note re PSA, there may have been some "cross-traffic" improving their standards after buying NoDakSpud and making it the nucleus of H&R 2.0 - if they're drawing from the same parts and supplier pools, making a play for the higher-end collector market could easily have forced improvement on the budget models too. (Like how they now heavily advertise Toolcraft bolts on many of their BCG's.)

When I had one of the last orders out the door at NDS, IIRC Harlan told me that Mike was expecting to really crack the whip and try to bring PSA up to NDS standards rather than let his brand get dragged down to theirs.

[Echo40]

It seems as though the more time passes, the better the market for ARs becomes. It used to be pretty well accepted that Colt was the absolute bare minimum for a reliable, dependable AR, and for good reason, but the more time passes, the less valid the sentiment has become. Nowadays Colt isn't the first nor the last name in the AR market.

Personally, I feel like it has a lot to do with the AR Community helping to raise public standards for quality, resulting in a higher demand for ARs of better build quality. Rob_s' old Chart became a sort of benchmark for AR manufacturers, and as a result the Army's TDP went from being the guidelines for a top-of-the-line AR to the standard.
Furthermore, as time went buy, more data was collected, thus resulting in a better understanding of what those specifications were actually for, when/where/why they were implemented in the first place, and which of them are actually relevant for civilian legal semiauto only ARs, so even those which didn't quite meet TDP Specs weren't automatically dismissed as garbage by the greater AR community, and suddenly 4140 CMV Nitrided Barrels weren't so bad anymore.

So higher standards and better understanding collided leading to the market as we know it today, where the Colt LE6920 is no longer the bare minimum, much less standard by which all other ARs were measured against, in fact the M4A1 is in many circles considered to be outdated, so there's less TDP pandering to hold the market back or force stagnation, because as relevant as the standard set forth by the TDP remain, folks will typically agree that non-standard deviations from the TDP such as Mid-length gas systems and free-floated rails have some advantages over the TDP-spec Carbine Length gas systems and drop in KAC quadrails.

I think that if anything the Army's adoption of the SIG MCX Speer as the new M7 Rifle was also beneficial towards the AR Market, as it not only drove away the wannabe Commandos who assert that whatever the Army has is the best with their appeals to authority, but along with them the notion that deviation from the TDP only resulted in a product of inferior quality.

[Gunpartpicker]

I have seen some of the return rate data for other brands ranging front defects to issues to customers just not happy with what the purchased. PSA has had some of the lowest return rates for brands in that category of price.