“They were from the school of thought that figured they could make the Brand Name sufficient to carry whatever tired old product line they managed to get out the door.“
Personally, I like their tired old product line. Being a port-spider, all of my shotguns and most of my rifles are of the left handed version. The problem is appears to me, Remington strayed away from its core competency. Whenever a company does that they invariably have problems, loose customer base, sales, profits, etc. even go out of business.
Mmmm... not so sure about that. The problem is that the market started moving away from *buying* their core competencies, so they bought in companies that were making what people wanted to buy. Where they screwed up was that they then ran them like another part of Remington, subject to the same crap that was ruining their main lines, and reduced this expertise they’d bought to some labels slapped on low quality weapons. They somehow managed to convert Bushmaster, which was a leading name in AR-15 pattern rifles at the time of purchase, into a laughingstock that nobody buys, to use one example.
They could have and should have left (again, to use the example) Bushmaster alone to continue in the marketplace. But they didn’t, they started micromanaging and needlessly consolidating their new purchase into what they already had.