The Shift Mod and the Old Reliable seem fairly similar. The main differences being that the Old Reliable goes into a bit more detail regarding how things work, and also tries to imply that the gun should become 'substantially' easier to produce as a result of this fix, which seems a tad ambitious. I'd like to see the word 'substantially' replaced with 'somewhat' or 'slightly', and then I'd vote for it.
I feel like the choice of a single word is unlikely to substantially, somewhat,
or slightly alter the judgement of the design difficulty-wise but, sure. Also it *should* probably make a serious alteration since the precision of the mechanism is said to be the majority of the costs due to outright waste.
It's not a bad gun at all. Is it perfect? Definitely not. But even with its rate of fire reduced in the user being as safe as possible and manually rotating the cylinder, it's still an extremely competent gun. The civilian sector bit is to playfully point out that this isn't historical fiction; it's just fiction. There's a reason you're in year -3 and not given some specific 18th/19th-century year or anything, after all.
My problem with how it was judged is that it's received what definitely seems to be a major bug. It *doesn't* work as intended, since the double-action part fails so often. So the gun itself, while functional as a gun, is still not up to the spec of what it was
supposed to be, which sounds to me more like an "above expectations" of a VH difficulty, where the device has trouble, but is greatly functional, whereas I was kind of expecting "above expectations" on Hard to be a basically functional device. Anything less seems, to me, like it might push the desire for innovation backwards to make sure we don't get modifiers that are going to always leave us with issues we'll need to fix.
EDIT: I changed the wording a little in the proposal.