[JohnKSa]

I really want to know the scenario that you envision where being able to single load rounds ad infinitum is important and feel it would save someone's life where single loading with a broken extractor wouldn't.

I can think of a couple, but here's one that's actually pretty practical.

In a combat situation, a soldier might be reduced to using his sidearm. This happened to several soldiers during the "Blackhawk Down" incident in Somalia. If he runs it dry but has loose rounds (or compatible rounds from an incompatible captured weapon--9mm is ubiquitous) direct-chamber loading could keep his gun running without having to take a long break to reload a magazine. The slide would lock back with the gun empty. The soldier could drop in a loose round, drop the slide, fire and repeat as necessary. That would allow him to keep up fairly constant fire in a situation where stopping to load the magazine with the loose rounds might be prohibitive from a time standpoint.

In that situation, having to manually extract rounds would definitely be highly undesirable since the reason he's direct-chamber loading is to avoid a long period where he's unable to fire his sidearm.

So my takeaway is that this "pre-loading-the-chamber-and-dropping-the-slide" nonsense will definitely fail the extractor prematurely... but it takes hundreds/thousands of slide drops to do it. He was shooting 50,000 rounds a year for two years, spread over at least 8 different guns... It took 2 to 3 years for the problem to show up.

Using the figures in your post, it appears that his extractors started failing at somewhere between 1000 and 1250 rounds per pistol being direct chamber loaded.

A person who unloads and reloads their chamber on a frequent basis--say 5 days a week--would chamber a round 1000-1250 times in the space of 3.8 to 4.8 years. If they unload/reload daily the figure comes down even further--2.7 to 3.4 years. So even accepting that it takes many repetitions to cause the extractor to fail, a person using direct-chamber loading as an alternative to properly chambering a round each time they unload/reload their carry pistol could end up causing an extractor failure in their carry gun in less than 3 years.