Especially as this is at least half-heartedly a chart for a self defense carbine, potentially during civil unrest.
a gun (or car) you can put hands on and personally inspect, and if you have a knowledgeable buddy also ask them to inspect, and agree upon will always be useful for finding pawn shop gold or consignment shelf treasure. in my neck of the woods about the only few AR-15s that i would feel okay buying without personal inspect would be Colt LE 6920/6940 models, Windham Weaponry/Bushmaster R series rifles, Rock River LAR-15 series, or various models from BCM, DD, LWRC, Armalite, LMT, and a few others. the LE6940 is a hair over $1k and worth it imho, with an alternate being the R14 or XM4 WW/BM rifles, et c.
for under $1k unit cost i'm not sure there's much of anything i would buy off the shelf for duty use that isn't an upper on an existing lower. i guess nabbing a BCM on sale is possible, or a used LE6920 somewhere, not sure if i'd count those since they wouldn't be new rifles. really the bar is lower for sporter carbines with lighter duty schedules and a more general variety of uses than something that's riding around patrol vehicles or banging around in a stryker all day and humped over hill and dale by a grunt. a sporter can to target shooting, get various caliber conversions for cheap shooting, run weird ammo combos or re-manufactured ammo, deal with a less than ideal maintenance schedule, have to hit coyotes on a farm or deal with some home invaders after your pain meds.
because of that a .223 sporter rifle, to meet both budget and use-cases, shouldn't be overly expensive and specialized, and likewise has to be high quality enough to deal with a lot of weird situations and corner cases. the issues highlighted in the SAR video about Ruger are mostly a non-issue to me with that in mind as it's a good rifle for the money asked and the fixes are a wrench and youtube video away from being fixed. if anything this should be a wake up call for Ruger to improve their assembly processes, and it's also good that it's nothing like missing gas key staking or bad chamber sizing or loctite being used during assembly.
heck, some guy that buys that rifle is also equally likely to never touch it more than a few times a year much less fire it in anger. does that mean it should be a cheap POS for looks? no, it means that spending money on a KAC SR-15 is wasted on that guy and better spent on a handgun and ammo that will encourage better preparation and more putting rounds down range. that latter bit for "civil unrest" may be more useful than a $2k AR or hand-wringing over a castle nut staking.
just my $0.02.
