HD--
This is a great topic and I thank you for starting it.
Having said that, now I'm on the attack--
There is a fundamental problem with the way you've set up the issue. Your definition of high/low tech is ahistorical and fails to take into account technical/manufacturing progress (what is high tech in one generation may be low tech in the next), evolving social/economic conditions (the development of corporate organizational forms, the decline of guild forms of organization, and the rise of state/government sponsored research development and manufacturing (in this context, national defense initiatives, whether NASA in the 20th century or various government owned arsenals in the 19th).
Once upon a time Damascus steel (or a Toledo blade, for that matter), was the best out there. Over the last half century various snarky comments (sadly grounded on experience) have been made damning the metallurgical deficiencies of Spanish and Turkish guns. Half a century ago, it's possible that Spanish industrial practices, immediately after WW2, were sufficiently deficient that one could offer that caution legitimately. Today, the diffusion of steelmaking expertise around the world has gotten to the point that if there is a problem with the steel in a Turkish gun, blame the specifications to which it was manufactured at the behest of the foreign distributor, not the lack of state of metallurgical expertise in a country that is, after all, the home to any number of parts manufacturers in the supply chain of the global auto industry.
I mean, who would ever have thought that an Indian company (Tata) would end up owning British Steel, the consolidated entity that is heir to the traditions of Birmingham and Sheffield?
I hope I'm not just piling on and reinforcing Gnomon's point. To come at your issue from a different angle, my gut feeling is that, in terms of the pace of technological development of small arms, the century from 1815 to 1914 (end of the Napoleonic Wars to be beginning of WWI) saw more progress than the century from 1914 to 2013. But that's because during that period improvements in small arms technology had more real-world military consequences than they have had for that last century. You can make a pretty good argument that the Soviet development of the AK-47 sixty years ago was the last 'sea change' event in small arms technology and the various Vietnam-era doctrinal shifts in American military thinking about the role of small arms in combat marked an end to efforts in that direction for other reasons.
Just my two cents, FWIW, and, again, thanks for starting the topic.
