Hey, this is my niche! This article is not very good - think of the last article you read about the internet betting a series of tubes, and your Steve Jobs is a brilliant coder.

The rifle design objectives are pretty poor, but there's some interesting innovations in there nonetheless. Unfortunately, it's mostly academic; modern symmetric warfare places less emphasis on small arms than ever before, and asymmetric warfare suffers huge diminishing returns from small arms investment.

In short, the AR15/M16 family will be around for a while, and that's fine.