Getting started:
About 16 or so years ago I introduced the idea of Rimfire Benchrest at a club I use to be a member of. A number of people were interested in the beginning but as people started getting better guns and learned about finding ammo the rifles prefered,etc folks began to drop out. We got down to a core of 6 or 7 shooters. We then began to get folks from other places who shot similar games to us and we had a great time.
The next year, the level of rifle quality had grown and the ammo chase became more difficult as scores got better and by the third year, there were not many people left and we found other things to do. Some of us got into CF benchrest and, in not very long, bought the rifles and associated equipment to compete with.
I see similaraties to what I exerienced and what is going on here. I believe that trying to make Production Air RIfles shoot well is as futile as it was with RF rifles. A few of them will shoot well but, in general, most of them will not be competative. It's one thing to learn a sport with state of the art equipment, and then the frustration of trying to learn with equipment that is not capable of winning. Those of us who love the Benchrest Sports have been willing to do what we could do to be competative.
I don't see that this effort will be any different than What we experienced way back then and even today. All of us are still looking for those "World Class" lots of ammo or even pellets, I am guessing. It's the sport itself that demands perfection, not the rules. There will always be those few rifles, even low end ones, that will be winners but in the Production end of things, a lot fewer than either Rifles made for competition by factories and/or customs. Personally, I don't want to spend $700 or 800 to end up with a rifle that will never be capable of winning consistently. I know that going in, from years of jousting windmills. I know where the road leads and I want to avoid the broken hearts along that road and go around it, to the destination that experienced people know about.
As Wilbur has said, being a competitor is a genetic situation. There is no way to make people become something they are not. A better solution is to present the sport to existing competitors and see where it goes. It's nice to be able to shoot rifles that do not recoil and are quiet enough to not need hearing protection. The challence of the actual shooting to me seems about the same as the other Benchrest I do. The idea of the savings in Ammo cost is very appealing to me, along with those other things I like but it's about the only place to save much, it looks to me.
This is not unlike the evolution of Moto-Cross. I was racing bikes in what were called Scramble Races when the European Motorcycle Manufacturers sent their top riders over here to show us how to race Moto-cross. Torston Holman, Joel Roberts, Jeff Smith and others who's names I don't recall right now. It didn't take long for other Makers to get involved, even though it took them a few years to make bikes that could win. I paid $600. for my first Red Tank CZ, new in the box. It was somewhat competative and took a couple of years, at least, off my learning curve. It wasn't a "Works" bike but it was head and shoulders above the modified production bikes folks were trying to win with.
We are in the same situatin here, just two or more decades behind it.
... gonna see em this Wed.