Adding 3/4" to the barrel would make it heavier and bigger. I would not choose it for a pocket carry.
I wouldn't pocket carry it, either. My use case is for the occasional shooter or casual shooter who wants an all purpose gun. People who don't shoot that much really don't do well with revolvers or larger caliber guns, especially under stress. The longer barrel adds some performance to the .380. As geeollie expressed, it is similar to the Sig P365 series, where Sig is selling a ton of guns playing with grip module and barrel variables. (It's too bad the .380 version of the P365 is bigger than it needs to be due to Sig's desire to use the same fire control unit as the 9mm versions.)
I would not say the Body Guard 2.0 is a success.
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The concept design of the BG2 has some very desirable features. It's just unfortunate that the list of design flaws and poor quality control has made it BG 2.0 (Botched Gun 2.0 of the Year.
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If it had been released without the list of flaws, and the need for me to "gunsmith it", I would have easily paid $649 for it.
Neither I nor the market agrees with you. It is a runaway success. Most of the gripes are simple matters to address.
My hypothesis on the BG 2.0 is that it was designed to be a high performance, durable gun consistent with its heritage from larger M&P series, and it was constructed with durability the same as the Glock 42 from Glock and the Sig P365-380. It also was designed to be the tiniest micro package with the highest capacity the engineers could cram into it. High quality guns always start with tighter tolerances among the moving parts, and micro-sizing creates a whole lot more tightness with things like dual recoil springs and magazine springs. There is no way anyone should expect a micro that is built for tens of thousands of rounds at a cost of $400 to function like a loose rattle trap right out of the box. One particular issue with .380 is that it does not get the same attention to detail from ammo manufacturers as the more common duty calibers that benefit from vast quantities of taxpayer funded research, and it also goes into a wider variety of guns from the high performance ones to the low budget ones that won’t see 500 rounds through them ever (and even that number is generous). That is not a gun problem.
To paraphrase something I was told from one of my first firearms instructors, things like trigger jobs, polishing surfaces and adjusting tolerances are simply accelerated wear unless there is a major problem with a gun that needs fixing. Shooting guns lets the guns figure it out.
The issue some have had with the recoil spring assembly is not something that is going to get people killed in a gunfight, and S&W offered replacements to people who called. The front of the spring on mine flattened out from just shooting the gun. The ridge on the frame by the barrel has worn nicely from shooting. Drifting a sight is no big deal. I have to drift sights on just about any gun I have owned. The magazine springs loosen up.
I tend to be an early adopter of new technology. In all of my years of buying new tech, I have sent guns back to S&W, Ruger, Beretta and Sig. I had a trigger spring that broke on a relatively new Beretta 92 that I discovered a couple of days after I almost had to use the gun to stop a loose, angry dog. One major brand I have not sent back is Glock, but I was a late adopter and a lot of the early bugs were worked out by rolling upgrades and version changes by the time I got on board with the particular Glocks I bought. (Even so, I do have a Gen 4 that exhibits the known occasional brass to the face quirk.)
It is frustrating to get a gun that does exhibit a real problem. I understand that. Unfortunately, hardware providers don't have the ability to push through upgrades over the Internet like software companies do after they release their products into the wild. The only way for a prospective hardware user to avoid this issue is to wait a while before buying something.
