You seem to be of the opinion that "firearms expert" is limited to "firearms use expert" and not much else.
There are 0300s out there that are experts with using their M4. Does that make them all "firearm experts"? No. It means they are a bog-standard USMC riflemen. Hand them something different and ask them to field strip it and the parts that didn't get lost would get shoved up their nose with the crayons. We saw exactly this happen when the USMC used the Reising SMG in WW2. The gun wasn't Marine-proof and had to be withdrawn from frontline service.
Expertise is far broader than one narrow concept. History, use, development, repair, etc are all important factors.
Modern society is proof that no one person is smart enough to be a genius in all fields, or even all parts of their chosen field.
In his semi-satirical treatise on economics,
Eat the Rich, humorist J.P. O'Rourke points out that, in modern society, a pencil is seen as a cheap, throwaway item with little value. They're worth is so insignificant that just breaking the tip is seen as a reason to throw one away instead of going to look for a sharpener.
Yet, the average person is incapable of making one due to the wide variety of skills and materials needed.
To make one lousy pencil, you'd have to be a lumberjack to get wood, a woodworker to shape the body, a miner to get graphite, a geologist just to know where to look for it, a chemist to refine it, you'd also need to be a botanist and have the skill to care for a rubber tree to make the eraser.... and a painter to get the yellow stuff on the wood... and on and on and on it goes.
Science is the same way, even Einstein worked in the company of people like Fermi and Neils Bohr and others that they could bounce their ideas off of together. The Hollywoodism (and Movie Bobism) of super smaht people having a divine right to lead the sheep comes from this and is laughably immature, or would be, if they didn't always do their best to make it so we, the commons, cannot defy the "expert".
So, that's the problem with "Experts" and how everyone gushes over experts - yes, there is an area of expertise they have, but it in no means translates to expertise in all fields, or even what they may be speaking about currently. And when we exalt the "expert" we forget the mountain of equally smart down to just mundane people they stand on top of unseen to have all that knowledge.
I'll trust Ian 110% to tell me about the history and development of the AR platform from the 60's XM-series that was seen as so out-there and Buck Rodgers that the Ordinance Department deliberately fucked with them in the hopes they'd fail their trials so they could go back to building "proper" military rifles with wood furniture and full-size 30.06 cartridges (just like God intended!) up to todays' ubiquitous civilian-grade AR-15s, but that doesn't mean (nor do I think he would disagree) that he gets to chime in on the intricacies of self-defense with any more authority than you or I or anyone else who's seen the video.
So when I go for legal breakdowns of a case, I instantly tune out when anyone, even from Harvard Law, starts going down personal political paths as if such diversions are just as scientifically/legally sound as a reading of the statutes.
Oh, and P.S. - The Reising wasn't just not Marine-Proof, it wasn't Soldier-Proof, the QC at the factory was so lax every single gun was essentially a hand-fitted original as the parts wouldn't interchange with another and had no ability to tolerate dirt, sand and mud. In the hands of cops, they were in use as a budget Thompson submachinegun into the 50's without issue.
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