Meh. If you're not trying to meet people for local events or whatever, what's the point of a local forum? You'll get more varied experience/knowledge/opinions on bigger generic forums, and much better brand-specific info on their forums. CZ, HK, Sig, ect all have at least one big forum. Hell, I've forums with heavy traffic for (IMO) some really incosequential stuff. I'm pretty sure there's a S&W Sigma/SVE forum. Or Taurus forums. I don't dare to look for it, but I'd go a notch lower and say there's probably a Hi-Point forum.
...I mean, not to blanket certain guns as 'bad.' More often, functional, but cheaply-priced and it is often reflected in the products. They WORK, they may even be dead-nuts reliable...but I still don't want them. Anyway...
I have a question for the other ATYAGTers: Do you consider light strikes in a semi-auto handgun to ever be acceptable? Certainly there is a place for guns that will not reliably ignite all (or at least the vast majority of) primers- in competition. It's to your advantage to have hammer (or striker) parts that are on the ragged edge of not working. Light hammers, light hammer springs. Trigger's with no takeup/overtravel, which means they barely have room to break/reset. Ect.
...but for a carry or a HD gun? Would you be confidant in one that appears to ignite all high-quality primers, almost all mid-quality primers, and NONE of the worst Russian primers?
I finally went and shot my P290 for the first time today. For the size (and its purpose), I thought it did fantastic. I can deal with the DAO trigger just fine (more on that later), and you definitely start to notice that for what would be called a mildly bulky pocket gun (>LCP/P3AT but not by much), it has so many good big-gun qualities. The trigger is ALMOST too light and smooth- getting close to Kahr-iness. Smooth, no stacking...but a little TOO smooth, seeming to just be empty takeup rather than actually having an action you can feel.
And there-in lies the problem: it could easily have enough hammer spring added to raise the average trigger pull weight by a solid couple of pounds, along with letting you feel the workings of the trigger mech a little better. This helps me with slow, aimed fire by letting me know exactly where the trigger is and when the break is coming. Helps with SD in that it tends to prevent, or least help identify, malfunctions. Less likely to have an incomplete pull/reset because you've got no tactile feedback.
Having fudged with a few hammer springs on various guns, down to cutting coils and whatnot, I kinda felt like the hammer on the P290 seemed awful soft. And IMO, I was right. It takes two strikes on a Monarch primer. Every single time. Shitty $10/50 Monarch 9mm, with genuine laquered steel casings, is something I always like to have around- it is the #1 widely-available ammo for giving a gun the ol' concrete primer test. I had one or two (unsure) light strikes on range-grade PMC ammo. I ignited all the higher-end ammo I had, but that was only about 20 rounds of various hollowpoints. The true test will be Tulammo, which I did not have on hand. The primers are harder than anything your typical gun range will sell (harder than PMC, UMC, Win WB, Blazer, ect). But a bit more forgiving than the Monarch.