/johnny
He got his education as he was working in aviation plants. As an engineer, when one looks at Stoner’s designs, you can see the aviation manufacturing influence on his designs. Unlike Browning’s designs, which were clearly the work of a gunsmith, Stoner’s designs solve various problems in ways that are most easily manufactured, not the typical ways that gunsmiths would build up guns (especially the lockwork) from a bunch of small, fiddly parts that had been hand-fitted.
Stoner also benefitted from the time period in which he designed his guns - it was the timeframe in which NC (numerically controlled) machines were coming into being, and you could program machine operations onto a punched paper tape to get repeatability. Prior to the late 50’s, gun makers had to set up huge machine shops, usually with one machine dedicated to one operation in a production line in order to get throughput and repeatability. Reading of how much machinery and investment in tooling Winchester put into something as simple as the Model 12 pump shotgun astounds me today.