OP said that he's thinking about this from the industry's point of view in post no. 7. He's not talking about why we buy guns. He's talking about why companies develop guns.
Because they want to make money, and most of the new wave of crap is really oriented towards getting existing gun owners to think/believe they need something else. If Sig sells a P365XL to a new gun owner, great, but that really isn't the target market for these types of guns. Newbs that want a gun badly enough are going to spend their money on something, it wasn't as if there was a lack of choices. Rather they want guys like us, some of whom may have an urge to set a tax refund on fire, etc, to buy shit we probably don't need based on interest....
Sig Sales Director: "The post 2013 panics are gone and the market is sort of in a slump now, stable, but not really thriving. What should we do? New gun owners are buying stuff but 80% of those are mostly one and dones... and the rate isn't high enough to get us huge growth. "
Sig Marketing Guy: "We need to make a few new products we can peddle to the existing gun enthusiast base, make something different enough with enough hype that it will make consumers wonder what all the hype is about, so they'll have to buy it, even if they don't really need it. Also it would be a big boon for us if we can "beat" the competitors to this market of people
setting cash on fire, because we were late to the striker fired market to begin with. We'll even offer a model with an RDS on it because Glock and others are starting to get into that crap
now and it's becoming an enthusiast fad, if we can put pistols like this right into the market, the enthusiast base will suck for this and we'll sell at least a pretty good chunk of them. "
I'm not just singling out Sig either here, Glock and others are doing the same damned thing. That's why in the past 4-5 years you're seeing all this squirrely shit get released, because they're
basically trying to court people like US more than anything else. It's "new" shit to put on gunrags, youtube, etc in an attempt to get people to buy new stuff. It's another way of getting
people to turn their cash into gun buys. Say for example you have a guy that has a few school bus P series sigs, well, now the P365 gives him a couple new guns to buy now that he might jump in on, etc.
let me put this one out there..... these companies know there are a bunch of people like us, that already have a bunch of stuff. And most of these buyers, don't have dupes in their collection unless they're nuts over a particular model of gun or something. But you can get those guys to buy a
DIFFERENT new gun....
-Mike