Hi Steve,
Just found out today you\RRA were participating here on ARFCOM. I want to first say welcome and I'm glad to see you guys here!
I hope you guys re-consider your decision to not produce a true light weight (.625 dia A1 profile) 16" mid-length barrel. As long as it was also fully chrome lined, I think you would see a fair amount of interest in it. Not everybody buys AR's to go bench rest shooting or to hang a bunch of crap on. Some of us just want a light, handy and reliable carbine and consider "Minute of Dead" accurate more then enough.
I (as well as a number of people here) paid a $50 premium to have one of your middy barrels turned down to A2 profile from Steve at ADCO because we didn't want the extra weight of an HBAR barrel. It made a nice difference but now I would like it even lighter. I guess I could send it out to get turned down even more but that is cost prohibitive and finding a .625 FSB and a 'smith good enough to install it correctly is not easy.
There are a number of options for lightweight 16" carbine gas system barrels but none for mid-length gas system barrels. You guys could potentially be the sole provider for an item like this and as such I think you would be able to sell enough of them to justify the setup cost for at least one run?
While we are kind of on the subject, I would like to suggest two more things...
1. Offer some chrome line 1/7 twist barrels. I feel 1/9 is OK but then trend in defensive .223\5.56mm ammo is use heavier bullets. 1/7 twist barrel handle those heavier loads better but still handle the typical 55gr stuff just fine.
2. Start marking your barrels like most other major manufacturers do (Colt, FN, BM, LMT) with info such as chamber, twist rate, etc... here's some examples...
FN...
LMT
and for S and H's, here's a picture of my 16" middy that I built using mostly RRA parts...