Well, that was a read...
A little background: Own a variety of CZ design pattern guns, have done many action jobs on said guns and have years of manual and CNC machining under my belt and have designed many products that are in the category of "cannot fail (or people might die)" applications.
I'd like to address a few points:
Slide stop "design flaw" as some have stated. This is way overblown in this thread. About as much as in some other threads I've read about their Glocks going kaboom. There is no inherent design flaw with the CZ pattern in my opinion. However, if some of you who continue to make this claim would prefer to provide some actual data that back those claims up, I'm all ears. I think others have quite adequately covered the issue and put it to rest - out of tolerance guns have resulted in broken slide stops. It happens, and it didn't happen due to any inherent design flaw.
Machining quality. Yes, the CZs are typically rough. Their triggers are gritty from the get go and they usually have an abundance of tooling marks on the slide and frame. Said tooling roughness is usually of the cosmetic variety, however. Now that said, on the P-01 I own and per CZs marketing "claims", there is a significant quality bump in the machining on a P-01. I haven't noticed the same bump in quality on the SP-01, however. It could have something to do with their NSN cert, who knows. It is more likely the case that the aluminum frames for the P-01 run on newer CNC machines held to higher tolerances. All speculation on my part, however...
I think there are a few things this thread has missed up to this point:
1) The CZ design pattern is produced by a variety of different manufacturers. On the economical end is Tanfoglio (Italian) and on the pricey end is Sphinx (Swiss). If you compare a CZ, part by part, to a Tanfoglio, you'll readily note that the Tanfoglio is both machined and finished to higher standards and has a number of "nice touches" on the internals where things were changed enough to make a positive difference. Of course, all new Tanfoglios have a redesigned frame and come in any caliber you wish to shoot. My pin gun is a 10mm with my load that pushes a 180gr. @ 1300 FPS which gets the pins off the table in a hurry. Point being, if there were any inherent "design flaw" I'd likely have a kB story or two to tell but I don't... That said, there are many CZ pattern guns you can buy with the same or better ergos if you don't actually want the CZ name brand. For instance, previously mentioned gripes about the short beavertail are usually addressed in the other manufactures products.
2) I think that relying only on the CZs use in the military/armed forces as to it's "reputation" is limiting, for two reasons. One is because we do not have the data. Yeah you can assume that use is "over reported", but without any real data, you'd be no closer to the truth. The second reason, is that the CZ design pistols are very widely and actively used in competition (particularly in Europe). In fact, they are most common in IPSC/USPSA Production class which, contrary to earlier claims, means they are not highly modified "race guns" and of course are also widely used as Open class guns. The top three used are CZ, Tanfoglio and Spinx. In fact as I opened up my Front Sight magazine today, I see on page 23 a nice picture of a Production Sphinx held by Jack Romer. This point to be made here is simple, really: serious competitors don't seek out unreliable guns and they do put thousands of rounds through those guns (at least the serious ones do...).