The design was patented in 1848, and was a percussion design. It stuck pretty much to the designs of caplock rifles of the day. Equally primitive, except for the breechloading innovation.
When they were converted to cartridges, that offset firing pin design was necessary to transfer the firing pin blow from the percussion nipple to the centers or rims of cartridges. Not an ideal compromise, but one that could be made to work in mass production.
Ten years more of progress in the Industrial Revolution was a quantum leap in the technology available to the aspiring genius firearms designers like Starr, Ballard and Maynard. But the Sharps design managed to hold its own against them for another 20 years, so it must have had something going for it.
The success of the 1874, and that of the Freund and other custom conversions, was totally dependent upon immigrant German master gunsmiths willing to do piecework in factories or concentrate on their own developments in their own shops. When they went out into the world in search of higher wages, that was the end for such designs. A machine-made Borchardt was cheaper to manufacture than the 1874. And, of course, the new, high-tech repeating designs cut into the market as well.
We see the modern iteration of this “design fault” in the complaints that show up about some of the Italian Sharps clones, and occasionally even a few of the US made replicas, when things aren’t done exactly right. The lower the tech, whether making the guns, loading the cartridges or using the iron sights, the higher the skill needed to make it work.
Some of us find this a fascinating challenge. Or maybe we’re just a buncha masochists.