Count me in as a 1914/17 fan - to the point if I win the Powerball, I'll try to start up a factory for them. I just wish there was a better way to fairly compare all of them. As a whole, it's going to be hard to beat the Swedes, the Swiss, and maybe to a lesser degree, the Finns, because all three of those nations took their shooting very seriously and (aside from the Finns) didn't have the press of invading or invasion affecting their production speed or quality. Never mind the fact that most of their rifles weren't blown up by artillery, submerged in Belgian mud, or dragged across half a dozen Pacific islands. I was working in gun sales in the early 1990's after the Soviet Union fell apart and they unloaded all their milsurps out of storage. You could visibly tell from the receiver dates, build quality, and condition of the Mosin Nagants and Mausers which way the tide was flowing. A fun history lesson, but not one you can properly judge a design by - - unless you're gauging it just by the fact it still works after all that.
Conversely, the few "mothballed survivor" export Mausers I've run across (most memorably, a Persian one) are absolutely stunning, and my guess would be that they probably shoot as well as they look.
The question that is practically impossible to answer. . . .that we'd all like the answer to is: "Which was the best rifle when it was both built right and new?". The best 5-shot cast group I ever fired was from a friend's Finn M39 with either the 311299 or 314299 and (as I recall) 2400. Having pulled apart one owned by another friend, I can see why - amazing attention to detail on the inside of that stock. Considering that they chose to use the clunky Mosin Nagant action as the heart of those rifles, and Frankensteined them together out of captured parts around it, one tends to conclude that if a milsurp got built true to the blueprints, any of them can be made to deliver.