JeffB, you must have had really bad luck with your Rugers. I' ve never seen one that would shoot out of 1.5 inches. My .338 will shoot under one inch at 100 for as long as you want to sit there and take the pounding. My son had a 25-06 Varmint that would shoot anything you could buy under 1/2 inch. Maybe it was your scope I' ve owned around 15 of them in the last 25 years.
WWAG,
I used to sell Rugers (as well as just about everything else) for a living working at a large independent firearms/hunting/archery/fishing store back home. The accuracy problems were a major complaint from far more people than myself. This included not only customers/collectors/techs/gunsmiths but many of the distributors we also worked with and bought these weapons from. Ruger rifles generally needed custom work (glass bedding for the M77' s etc) out the box to get them to shoot as accurately as the other major brands we sold, though there were always exceptions. The general concensus was that for a span of about 10-12 years Ruger rifle barrels were very suspect in quality. Older guns from the 60' s and 70' s were of much higher quality (And posessed better out of the box accuracy) than guns of the 80' s and at the least until the mid-90' s (when I stopped working in the industry). I' m unaware these days of quality one way or the other for newer guns. Weatherby aslo suffered form these same problems when they were being made in Japan (as opposed to europe before that, and more current guns from the States)
That' s just my experience though, it certainly doesn' t invalidate yours. I' ve seen some very accurate Ruger rifles. Someday if I were to ever buy another firearm, I' d still be looking at a #1 or #3, as I find them elegant and handy hunting weapons.