Have you seen how cheap AR15s are now?

on the order of hundreds of bucks

The tight tolerances aren't in the gas system

They're in the locking system

Regardless of how you unlock and cycle the action, you still need those tight tolerances in the locking system

Fancy new systems don't make things cheap, economy of scale does

i mean thats kindof objectively not always true

computerized control has made a lot of things cheaper

It's true enough

because its way less effort to make it work right

you just tell the machine what you want and it does it

Computer control only works in the first place because of economies of scale

in terms of timing and such thats a fairly good deal

yes and you can use the same sorts of parts

everywhere

because they are pretty general purpose transformers of input into arbitrary output

you dont need a new computer for every application generally speaking

and a whole huge assembly line

Thing is, minimum an electronically controlled firearm requires pressure sensors in the barrel, actuators to unlock, some sort of battery and charging system, and a processor

you could probably do it off of timing alone, but pressure sensing is just a transducer

A gas system does all the same stuff with a few simple mechanical components

Again, it's not about what's possible, it's about what it does *better*

i mean in a lot of cases the whole (generally carefully tuned) gas system is purely to drive the unlocking timing

based more or less off of when the trigger was pulled

Not necessarily

its not like it actually understands the pressure of the system

if you use the wrong ammo it simply doesnt work right

That's an over simplification of how gas systems work

sure but the fact remains that they arent doing the job of a pressure sensor hardly at all

except for reacting to the fact that there is pressure

And even presuming an electromechanical system it would still be ammo sensitive

if it didnt rely on a pressure sensor then yeah it would need consistent ammo

Unless you actually cycled the action electronically

well if it did rely off of pressure readings then it could concievably unlock when pressure drops to a safe level

and then let the bolt cycle normally

But again, how is that significantly better?

Under what plausible circumstances would that be a real benefit

Why not just use quality ammo?

no pressure system, not neccesarily a need for the primer in cartridges

Realistically, inconsistent ammunition is not a significant problem

well because ammo costs money