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To be honest, the AR-15 platform is literally the best platform for doing what it does, which is standoff gun fights at intermediate ranges. All the other semiauto carbines are functionally inferior in my opinion, and I've shot a lot of them. Other guns really only shine over the AR-15 in specialized circumstances where the AR-15 has a specific disadvantage. Indoors, for instance, a PCC is probably better. At range, a 30 cal of some kind is probably better. Add in the fact that the AR-15 platform is almost infinitely customizable, and gives men the sorts of barbie doll accessorization fix they used to get from tinkering on cars, and it's no surprise they'd be popular. It's really pretty much the best gun you can buy for that particular task. It's just a great gun design.
The AR platform is only customizable to the degree it is in a post-GWOT, post-M4 carbine world. Even then you still have gas tuning peculiarities between various gas system lengths/blocks, buffer lengths/weights. Direct Impingement with the buffer system trades some weight and some softness in recoil for a lot of dirty gas in critical areas all the way down into the magazines. The buffer system also makes folding the stock for portability require an expensive adapter that still can't fire in that configuration so most folks disassemble the rifle for that use case. The design is mid and it survives because of half a century of government funding leading to wide availability of critical and add-on parts.
Well, it always was capable of that.
The trick about the AR-15 is that it's trivial for anyone with a CNC mill and a couple of aluminum billets to churn out the entire gun. Older designs rely on stamping and welding (or casting and milling), and newer ones require plastic and/or aluminum extruding machinery. Startup costs are correspondingly high- Tommybuilt has to charge over 3 times the amount for a G36 clone as Aero Precision does (who aren't even natively a firearms manufacturer to begin with), and the Aero is lighter and more accurate to boot.
Hence the market for attachments- it's legitimately the only gun that can take anywhere near that kind of modification, and those OEMs need parts other than what they can machine on the router.
Milling or forging the upper is not trivial. No one focuses on that because when the BATFE categorized what part of the AR was a controlled item they were concerned about full-auto uses and so picked the lower since traditional AR full auto configurations have a different fire control + sear pocket and drop-in auto sears were a later innovation. Stamp, bend and weld at scale is cheaper and faster than milling and forging. Especially when you have to mill along more than one axis. The T(G)36 clone costs are a mix of niche product, complex plastic receiver from a small shop and sourcing HK parts for all the rest.
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All this can be true, and yet it's still the best around. Your complaints boil down to one that is irrelevant (dirty gas), one that is actually a positive thing (the ability to tune the gas system to a wide variety of calibers), and one that is valid but incredibly minor (lack of ability to fire the gun with the stock folded/lack of folding stock).
There's a lot of military-pattern rifles that are very decent, but none that have anything like the raw number of options that the AR platform does. That is partially because the gun is military-pattern, which is always popular with civilians in the US. But moreso it's because those civilians are way out ahead of the government when it comes to innovation and technology applied to firearms. Competitive shooting drives technological innovation, civilians fund it by buying new "high speed" doodads for their guns, the military skims the stuff that works out the best. It's a "virtuous cycle" of technological development. If you added all the accessories available for the next ten most popular military-pattern rifles in the world together, they would be a tiny fraction of what's available for the AR.
Go ahead and just try to put a scope on an AK-pattern rifle. You'll see why the AR is popular. Shoot a Tavor and you'll appreciate the gas system from the AR. Try to re-chamber a G3 in the new hot caliber and you'll understand why it lost out. Every gun has its fanboys, but the AR is dominant in the same way the US military is dominant. It's not perfect, just better than everything else combined.
Pretty much every piece of high speed kit you're thinking of is attached via picatinny rail. Which I'm sure you know has nothing to do with the design of the AR as a platform. The US Army could have stuck with the slightly updated magazine fed Garand as a platform and you'd still have the same sort of kit hanging off it. Carry handle gooseneck mounts and underbarrel grenade or shotgun mounts you could claim exclusivity to the AR platform if you wanted I suppose.
The Warsaw pact side rail dates back to N variant AKMs that holds and returns to zero with non-garbage tier attachment mounts pretty simply. It's easier for me to swap between two mounts with different optic combos on them on one of my AK patterns than setting up two optic combos on a picatinny rail with indexing and having to QD each optic. (Say an LPVO to a red dot + magnifier and back again, at least the magnifier doesn't need QD but it's appreciated when swapping.) Personally speaking I don't get gassed out of my x95 with the factory port cover. Sure it matters for suppressing and mag dumping but that also applies to the AR platform. The CETME was originally built for 7.92x41, was rechambered to 7.62x51 but has been scaled down to 5.56x45 and 9x19 so the delayed roller lock system is not that difficult to rechamber. With the roller system there's a bit more tolerance for different pressures since it's not a gas system at all. The stamped metal receiver weight and wear and tear on the rollers having to be checked with calipers are major draw backs of that platform. It doesn't drop in swap but even with the split receiver design of the AR you're not jumping from 5.56 to 7.62 with the same lower. In a slightly different timeline where the BATFE wasn't focused on full auto conversions, different AR uppers would have been considered different firearms and for good reason what with the whole matched bolt, barrel and tuned gas system being integral components. The threaded screw-in barrel is an actual design upgrade compared to pressed trunnion barrels but that serviceability come at higher per-unit costs of having to thread that end of the barrel. The MCX platform does one better on that score of course by using trunnion pin-like captive clamping screws.
That virtuous cycle is my point. The US military could have standardized on literally any rifle design and most of what makes modern ARs attractive would apply all the same. The AR is dominant in the same way the US military is dominant because the US military is dominant (plus a side helping of foreign aid in the form of selling ARs for cheaper than any country could produce a competitor).
Meh, we disagree. I think the AR is dominant because the US has a civilian gun culture with disposable income. No military in the world would put the time and money into iterating a system like the American Gun Nut.
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The WWSD project shows that, thanks to all that focus and development, you can still optimize the hell out of an AR, even if you can't get around some aspects.
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