6.5 Grendel on it's own merits

[LRRPF52]

I base it on my personal experience at matches. These are gas gun matches that go out to 900 or so yards. Everyone I see adopting a new small frame AR cartridge is going 6ARC. Within this group, Grendel is generally considered inferior to 6ARC. With cheap ammo readily available, Grendel was, at least to me, a no brainer. With that ammo pretty well gone, 6.8 SPC is arguably better for short range hunting, while 6ARC is better for longer range target shooting. I think Grendel is a great cartridge, but the fact remains that a big edge it had over competitors is gone. Just look at this forum. There's not exactly a flood of new members pouring in. Beyond that, Federal seems to have stopped producing ammo for Grendel. Prvi seems to be going away too. Hornady, Barnes, Nosler, and AA seem to be the only companies currently making new supplies. Of those, Hornady is the only major player. Again, it's a great cartridge, but its usage seems to be shrinking, not growing, at least to me. Hopefully, Hornady keeps producing decent quantities of ammo.

I haven’t noticed a change in forum membership with new members, not that this is an indication of adoption in the broader market. Most people shooting 6.5 Grendel are not members of a forum.
Large ammunition manufacturers have schedules when they produce particular chamberings. .223 Remington and .308 Winchester run in larger batches, while the rest of the cartridges get rotated through a schedule.

PPU isn’t going away since they supply military contracts for 6.5 Grendel. Pre-WuhanFlu, there were at least 81 different factory loads for 6.5 Grendel, including from Barnes, Federal, Hornady, Nosler, PPU, Remington, Sellier & Bellot, and Wolf.

You have to look outside of just a tiny perspective from shooting matches and aggregate a large data set.

6.8 isn’t arguably better for short range. There have been some pretty large sample size collections from hunters shooting both 6.5 Grendel and 6.8 SPC on hogs, with no real difference within close range in hit/kill ratio.

Another thing to remember is that 6.5 Grendel isn’t any of the big manufacturers’ babies, so it’s not invented here, yet still is the only small shop originated cartridge that has SAAMI and CIP certifications/standardization with Federal Gold Medal Match and Wolf Steel case. That alone speaks volumes to the internet utility of the cartridge.

There will likely never be steel case 6.8 SPC, 6mm ARC, etc. 6mm ARC has how many manufacturers again? Will we ever see 81+ loads for 6mm ARC?

Look what happened with .224 Valkyrie or even worse, 24 Nosler and 22 Nosler. That’s with big ammo maker support behind them and lots of advertising dollars spent on promotions, paid reviews, etc.