There is a reason they discontinued the M95
To be fair, the design did dominate for like 20 years, several design versions, and is found in various forms all over the world. It fell to the Mauser/etc turnbolts for several reasons;
-Extremely poor gas handling; primer gas will pop the bolt hand back & open the gun into your face under pressure
-Expensive to make; sine-bar on a mill or live lathe tooling is needed to make the bolt head & handle cams
-Weak extraction; if using poor quality or dirty ammo, the gun is tied up a bit easier than with a bolt handle you can beat on if needed (I dispute it's that much of an issue in practice, though, since stuck cases tie up all designs)
-Weak extractor; extractor design is pretty poor, and breaks easily if dropped on a case rim or forced against a stuck case
-Magazine design; the Mannlicher clip design, while genius, isn't great for awful service conditions due to the open bottom
-Weak safety design; not sure why nothing better was made to replace it, but there you go
-Difficult service; it's a major pain in the fingers and butt to strip the gun for cleaning if that bolt head snaps down onto the handle (much like an HK roller-delay bolt, only there's no trick to getting the thing re-cocked)
Basically, tech advances that could have been applied to the design made it outmoded, because turn-bolts weren't found to be particularly 'inferior' to straight-pulls in any significant way, but did bring some marginal intrinsic benefits.
The old 'Ruck-Zuck' is still among the more light & hand bolt rifles out there, and is quite formidable in the hands of a practiced shooter with a bandoleer of clips. I think of it as the 'lever action' of bolt rifles, if that makes any sense; has some drawbacks that ended its favor, but was a very respectable package in its own right with unique charm all its own.
"Great guns. But, open is a stiff pull and close is more of a slap then a push. IMO"
People should try operating a Garand or AK or AR with the gas shut off & no return spring sometime
TCB
