Speaking as one who spent his career in one part or another of the manufacturing world, I stand in awe that Stevens managed to have such wild variation in bores, and yet their barrels were well reputed for their accuracy. But they sure do vary. My standout is a .32-20 with a groove diameter of .309", slugged and re-slugged because I didn't believe it. Even in the 1890s the tooling should never have allowed it.
When Irving Page took over in 1896, the shop was still under 100 men, by all accounts, and yet in five years he was claiming to be the largest sporting firearms mfgr. in the world, with hundreds of thousands of square feet and a thousand men at work. You don't do that without problems. I've been speculating for some time that he must have done it on huge amounts of borrowed money, (he was after all Joshua Stevens' financial hand, not an engineer). I further speculate that the reason he lost the company to Westinghouse in 1915 was that the bankers had him by the short ones.
Speaking to Bent Ramrod's Favorite: I believe that one huge reason it "shot loose" is that the links in the '94 models were never more than low carbon steel stampings, case hardened if they were hardened at all. They yielded like butter. (BTW that same is true of triggers and hammers. I cite an article reprinted in Kimmel's book as authority.) Adding metal to the lever to take the load off the linkage can do nothing but good. Chuck Deets did a set of force-vector analyses a while ago that show how the geometry of the action puts 70% of the thrust at the breech face onto the link!