Bart,
Again, you're just riding this whole thing right down to the point of driving it over the cliff.
You view it from the competition angle, where you know from the git-go you're going to lose money in pursuing your data, for your own specialized angle.
Gunwriters approach a product from a totally different perspective.
I keep saying the gunmags are a BUSINESS.
They exist to make money.
We write to pay bills.
With the exception of a few who pursue writing as a hobby, the rest of us derive some or part of our incomes from writing.
There HAS to be a profit to continue.
Putting the time & resources you keep on demanding simply kills that profit.
Your competition exists to satisfy your own desires, and when you want a piece of equipment to do that, you're willing to blow large chunks of money in getting there.
The gunmag articles are introductions, overviews, and "Here's what it did for me & what I thought about it."
They are starting points, not ending points.
They show a gun, its features, what it did in necessarily limited testing.
That's all so a reader who may not have access to a given model directly can see what the gun is & what it has, without tracking one down to handle it himself.
Of course there are variables that affect ANY gun's performance.
There are DOZENS of variables, which include everything from tolerance variations between individual guns, all sorts of ammo variables (internal SDs, external elevation, humidity, air density, external temperatures, wind, clouds, sun), all sorts of shooting variables (shooter stance, bench, rest, freestanding, prone, lead sled, sandbag), all sorts of sight & scope variables, and a wide variety of shooter variables (skill levels, experience, vision acuity, age), and so on.
All that's on top of a statistically inadequate sampling of ONE, with the test gun reviewed.
To do a genuine detailed test and reach a statistically valid conclusion on accuracy would take time & money that'd be a major investment in both, which could be satisfying to a target shooter on his own gun, in pursuing that last decimal point of truly repeatable accuracy applicable to his own niche uses in competition under repeatable conditions at the same distances & shooting at the same targets in the same manner time after time after time.
And then- that entire process would ONLY apply to that gun, which may or may not transfer to any other "identical" gun, in your hands, or anybody else's.
As any statistician knows, the larger the sampling, the more reliable the numbers & the better the extrapolations that can be made by them.
To be able to make a truly supportable "This gun is a half-inch shooter" conclusion relative to the entire model line on any gun, you'd need an intensive testing program involving at least a hundred off-the-rack samples, fired with thousands of rounds of ammunition under varying shooting conditions by dozens of people of all ages, vision capabilities, experience levels, and shooting abilities.
So, as I say again- what?
Your point is pointless.
The write-up, laid out one more time for you, is a story about what ONE gun did with THOSE loads on THAT day in the hands of ONE writer, and what he thought about the whole thing.
A starting point, regard it as Alpha, not Omega, in your quest for info on the gun.
Or, more simply, a conversation about a gun with a buddy, but in much more detail.
You want more, you're asking for more than the mainstream publishing system can provide, and you just need to get that "more" on your own.
We can say "Here's the gun, here's what the gun has, here's what the gun did for us at a standard yardage with four or five loads under standardized shooting conditions (bench, 100 yards, sandbag, etc.), and here's what we think about it from whatever our own experience & qualifications enable us to judge it by."
The rest is up to you.
We can't do it all for you.
Denis