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There's a lot of late 20th century and early 21st century opinion being applied to 1940s, 50s and early 60s weapons here...

I'm apparently in the minority here, as I found the recoil of the M14 to be relatively light, by my standards, which were formed from shooting a 6lb bolt action .308 Win for the couple years previous to my military service.

None of the designs has ever been without drawbacks and areas where other designs perform better. There is no "one gun does everything the best".

The open action designs do let in more crap than the closed ones, but they also let some of that crap out, which closed designs don't do well.

Since the general mechanization of all militaries following the Second World war, the priorities of what is most useful on the modern battlefield changed a lot. One of the big changes is modern rifles are not designed to be well suited to hand to hand combat.

Shorter lighter rifles, lighter recoilling rounds and lots of them is the way its done today.

I'm tired of hearing about how everything in the old days was "too heavy". Having seen 5' 100lb ARVN troops humping an 18lb BAR and keeping up with everybody else, I think "too heavy" is more of an attitude than a real issue.