I've shot a lot of ARs with a lot of mags. I've never seen one jam. I don't think clips are superior to mags for defending a static position, they would only be superior in the one-in-a-trillion scenario I described. Yes, magazines cost more than clips. But unless you're super broke, they are worth the extra cost. I feel like a 30-round en-bloc clip would be much more unwieldy and fragile than a regular AR or AK mag.
Cheap knockoff magazines can jam, meaning pre-loading 900 rounds of ammo cost about as much as another gun or several hundred additional loose rounds of ammo. It costs $300-600 worth of magazines, and that's without testing them with 30 rounds each. It's closer to $500-1000 just for magazines (alone) which have actually been loaded and test fired.
When storing mass ammo, magazines don't cost more than clips, they cost more than the rifle.
You can get 24 AR-15 magazines for less than $300. My Del-Ton AR was $400 on sale. You don't need to have your entire ammo supply in clips or mags, there's no point.
You can get a whole M4 clone for less than $500 afaik, but I haven't checked recent prices. You're saying the empty magazines cost nearly as much as the rifle itself? You're also not suggesting testing the magazines beforehand, which isn't cheap either. Fully loaded & pre-tested, the ammo storage winds up costing more than the rifle in some cases. Surely there's a better way, and there is, but it's not "cool" in the gun community. It's not something promoted by known "experts", so I can expect the sort of response I get. Like I said in one of my comments, if Rambo had used a clip-fed, 50-round machine gun, there would be no debate unless I switched my argument and advocated for box magazines instead.
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