A friend of mine was an engineer at Remington for more than 40 years. I often asked him about ideas I had and mostly he said "we tried that...." When they hired new guys the first thing they did was send them to the "firearms library" to look around at what had been done over the years. The firearms library was where they keep all of their research prototypes. He told me it generally took 8-10 years before the new guys were contributing..