Noticed you didn't mention Pakistan whom also make their own AK/47s which they reverse engineered themselves instead decided to pick on Ethiopia.
Actually many countries make a variant of the AK. The most famous would be Galil (Israel) and Type-56 (China). Or Russia for that matter (AK-74/AK-107 and many other AKs).
You can also make the spare parts yourself if need be. Sure you'd probably be better off with the .32 if you needed to repair something. But is still simpler than the AR-15 that the US uses, which is still simple as all hell.
That's the thing- you don't have to. Not in any professional western army. You need to take it apart, clean it, oil it, put it back the way it was. Repair will be done by other, qualified, people, probably a good deal away from the front line. If ,on the other hand, you are a Pakistani warlord, it might make sense for you to have low grade, but easy to maintain equipment (the passing of a weapon from military to paramilitary use (or from rich militaries to poor ones) is how you know it has become more outdated)
But we're talking about it in reference to Fallout, not in reference to the real world. In Fallout, you wouldn't have the skilled labor to repair it for you, or the skilled labor would be a wastelander just like you. Would you trust Moira with your guns? I'm saying that the AK would have survived for that primary reason. No skilled labor exists, so you have to have easy to maintain, repair and rebuild guns, or cheap VERY easily homemade things like muskets. Hell why do you think the US hasn't fully replaced the AR-15, for those exact reasons. It's easy to maintain, repair and rebuild. They are simple enough and good enough, that the trade offs for "better" ones are simply too much.
Except, in order for there to be a large number of AK-47s in the US, where Fallout takes place, they would have had to be there
before the war, after which the rest of the world ceased to exist as far as the Fallout lore is concerned, so any caches outside its borders become irrelevant. There are, however, a wealth of chinese rifles ultimately derived from and modeled after the AK-47, smuggled to black ops sleeper cells operating in/chinese sympathizers living in the US, which are presumably just as durable and easy to maintain, if not more so, as well as much higher quality.
I just read the OP, so this probably has no bearing whatsoever on the current discussion, but:
Why is having M-16s in the game a good thing? It's a shitty gun. In a post-apocalyptic world, you'd think that low-maintenance weapons would be important.
Current discussion is an extension of that. I believe we're all in agreement that M-16s are too fragile and unreliable to survive 200 years of abuse in an irradiated wasteland. Now it's about whether or not AK-47s should be present... :/
Smileys give me no indication on your stance.
Do you agree, not agree, what?
It was a hyperbolic joke about things being built to last, when weapons become useless with only minimal use. The repair system as a whole really was horribly implemented, compared to something like STALKER's.