I' m not " qualified" to make any sort of lifelong comparisons of various firearms as I am just not as versed in the art of rifles and riflemaking as most of you guys.........(heck I usually never have a tag left for rifle season after bow season ends!)
Anyway I went on a little bit of a rifle researching mission prior to my recent purchase of a Bolt Action rifle, and handled many guns and talked to quite a few people along the way about various manufacturers........Anyway ever since they came out I have always been fond of the Remington 700 Mountain Rifle(just something about it always made me want one), and going in I thought that was the rifle I wanted. That was until I actually played with a new one a few weeks ago. When I handed it back I said to myself that gun is HOW MUCH!? It was the model i dismissed as a possible the quickest after simply handling it. The Bolt felt like crap, the wood was blah, the safety felt like a piece of crap with about 1/8" of side to side play, and the gun just overall felt, for lack of a better word " Cheesy" . I didn' t even bother to look at the BDL' s etc just based on that one model. I was actually genuinely disappointed.
The Savage 16FSS with its synthetic stock at about $200 less felt more quality to me in my untrained hands........The 2 that felt the best to me were the Browning A-Bolt and the Ruger 77, they just felt like MORE gun for the money and I couldn' t help but wonder why someone would choose that Mountain Rifle.....brand loyalty?, looks?, who knows but I was not impressed at all. Even that new 700 Mountain Rifle SS with the laminated stock didn' t compare to the $150 cheaper Ruger 77 laminated stainless model (RBZ I think?).

If I knew absolutely NOTHING about rifles (I know a little[:-])Of all the models I tried if I were to line them up how I figured they should rank by feel,and impression of quality, I would have said the Remington was the cheapest of the bunch. I guess that says something? Not sure what exactly but I typed all this so it has to mean something right?