I would say it's a start. I'm sure metallurgists and material scientists are working on improvements.
After all, CANON used to be made from cast bronze!
And shotgun barrels used to be made of twist steel. I wouldn't advise running modern powder through either.
Metallic printing:
Yes, there’s a LOT of work being done on this. The reason is money. Think about this for a moment: As material costs go up (thanks to Bernanke turning the dollar into the value of a popcorn fart), it behooves any manufacturing company to use only the metal they need to make a widget, rather than get a larger block of casting of said metal and machine away what they don’t need - and then try to reclaim the chips as scrap. Additive machining gets your economics working in this direction. It is the reason why MIM took off in gun manufacturing in the late 90’s. Look inside a modern S&W revolver, and most of the lockwork you see in there was MIM’ed. The flat springs are still spring steel.
Ruger went sort of down this road a long time ago with their investment casting.
Damascus barrels:
Actually, if you go back and read WW Greener’s book on shotguns, you’d find out that some Damascus barrels exceeded the capabilities of “fluid steel” (as it was called then) in barrels in handling proof loads.
The dirty little secret is that many American shotgun manufactures used no-name Belgian damascus barrels, produced cheaply in Liege for the US gun market. The highest end (”best”) US shotguns (Parker, high-end LC Smith) had much better quality damascus barrels, and the “best gun” London/Birmingham guns and German (Suhl) guns can handle moderate modern loads as long as they’re inspected before use. RST makes shotshells for these guns. Another issue with the older Damascus guns is that they often have 2 1/2 inch chambers, NOT 2 3/4 inch chambers. Put a 2 3/4 shell into a 2 1/2 inch chamber, and you get very high pressures due to the constriction of the shell mouth into the bore. That’s true for fluid steel barrels too. All 16 gauge shotguns should have their chambers inspected and verified because so many of them produced will have shorter chambers than modern shells, even in “fluid steel.”
I learned a lot about damascus barrels this year. It’s incredibly interesting stuff. Here’s a site where you can see some of the beauty that was damascus steel:
http://www.damascus-barrels.com/Image_barrels.html
And a pointer to RST: