I'm not big on the new pistols either
Mostly because they don't have the features I want. And they have features I don't want. Often, lots of them.
Plastic frames don't bother me too much, per se, but the guns with plastic frames also lack those things that make the older steel frame guns so attractive to me. For me, autopistols need one of two things for safety, an exposed hammer, or a positive safety lever/button, that locks in both positions, until I move it. And thats just for starters.
I don't need or care for handguns with built in locks. If they are unobtrusive, they don't bother me, but a gaping keyhole in the side of a pistol just offends my sense of esthetics. I have always felt that locking (either internal or external) a loaded gun was a particularly stupid thing to do. And when unloaded, there's no point at all to locking it. Locking them up in a secure storage is a different matter entirely, and good sense too.
Rails, "memory bumps", and lots of other accessory features so popular with many today are also of little or no interest to me, and in some cases, are a severe detraction to the guns appeal, to me.
The hand finish work that used to be done by skilled men and women is now done (often badly), if done at all, by machines. Cost is the reason, they say. And they are right. Build them the way they did even half century ago, and an average handgun would cost an average worker a month's wages, instead of a week's. And that just the low end models! Also those people who have the skills to do the work like they used to aren't working in the factories able to train and teach the next generation of workers, anymore. There are exceptions, but in general, thats the way it is now.
As far as handguns go, the Colt Government Model as made for the army in WWII, was turned out by companies that had never made a firearm before at all, so I don't completely agree with the suggestion that master craftsmen were making them.
No, master craftsmen weren't making them. But, govt inspectors were ensuring that the parts made by all those companies that never made guns before (and also those that had) met the govt. specs. And the guns were assembled by men and women who had made guns before, from those parts. The rigid inspection criteria, and the amount of parts that failed and were rejected somehow isn't remembered nearly as often or as well as the fact that companies that never made guns before made the parts.
One of the reasons so many consider a 1911 a "starter gun" that needs tweaking, today is that so many different makers put them out on the market, and the only specs they have to meet is their own, and some of those have been "improved" (they believe) over the original GI criteria. Some makers do a fine job. Others not so much.
Even the cheaper guns of yesteryear were made pretty well. Of course, the cheapest were junk then, just as now. Want to see something surprising? Take a look at the insides of a pocket pistol made before WWII. Some of them are built like Swiss watches, compared to today. I have seen some European .25s from the 20s & 30s who's internals were polished, and even jeweled! And these were not high end guns even then! Skilled labor was cheaper, and plentiful, so they could and often did take the time to make the best product they could. Not just "good enough" to sell for a profit.
We have lots of things today that didn't exist back then, and some of them are delightful. But not everything, by a long shot.
