When the A1 version of the SA80 was brought into service around the late 1980s early 1990s was there an immediate need to replace the existing SLRs with something? Could the replacement for the SLR have waited a few more years to allow more time for development work to be carried out on the SA80? I suspect that if the SLR had been replaced with the A2 version we wouldn't have seen articles such as the one in post 1.