To be honest Darren, it'd take a whole book to relate the woes of the little SA80. But I have been saved the job by Steve Raw who wrote a book called The Last Enfield published by Collector Grade. But there's always a silver lining to every dark cloud because the much heavily modified A2 variant seems to have put all its critics into their place and shown that while the basic design was good, it needed perfecting and trialling PROPERLY before it could be considered fit for service.
Some have said that too much emphasis was spent on pushing the rifle forward too early, others say that the trials teams were prevented from saying thins they ought to have been saying while others say that there were far too many fingers in the original pie. Quite whoever suggested that the little L86/LSW was a light support machine gun and could replace the Bren or augment the GPMG was clearly on another planet. A rifle with a bipod and a long barrel is simply a heavy rifle! (As were the RPK,and the heavy L2A1)
But that said, nobody can really complain about the A2 rifle. It is however a case of give a dog a bad name that the good A2 version has had to shake off. The SUSAT was the only part of the rifle that noone ever complained about so far as I recall.
Added later..... It has been told that H&K did all the work to improve the A1 version but that isn't quite correct. MOST of the ideas were formulated at Shrivenham by some of the brains and technical bods there including WO2 Ray xxxxx and one of the bit part contributors to this forum incidentally. H&K won the contract to put all of the relatively small ideas into one package. There were other bidders to do the work but politics and business and........ Lets stop here!
Anything major amiss with it now Skippy? Brit Plumber? Apart from the fact that they're all getting a bit tired now