I'm interested in how you arrived at a 3/10 if you rated the individual elements so much higher.
It's like making a cake, you could go out and buy/source the very finest ingredients but the final quality of the cake isn't defined solely by the quality of it's ingredients, you'll still end up with a bad cake if you don't mix the ingredients appropriately and/or if you don't bake the cake appropriately.
In this case, the gun mechanism (cocking) sound effect is decent quality, it's a very present SFX, it sounds like it's happening a foot or couple of feet from your ears. The actual gunshot SFX is also reasonably decent quality but has a quite distant aural perspective, it sounds 10s of meters away. The reverb tail has been faded out early in an attempt to combat this impression of distance but it hasn't worked and just makes the sound effect sound wrong. These two completely different aural perspectives of the SFX not only contradict each other but also contradict the visual image. We don't see the gun being cocked a foot or so in front of us and we don't see the gun being fired 10s of meters away. The ingredients are all decent individually but don't combine to result in a decent cake!
Again, I just don't understand your math. Improving the visuals a little would only change the overall rating half a point, while improving the audio a little would move it a couple of points? It seems to me your rating system merely reflects your bias towards sound.
Sound is different to and has an advantage over all the other film crafts. In a professional workflow, audio post (and particularly the final sound mix) is the final stage in the making of a film. The advantage is that we get to see our design and other work while we are working on it, in combination and therefore in context with what is otherwise a finished film. This allows us (or should allow us!) to concentrate pretty much exclusively and far more precisely on how our craft combines with the other crafts.
I don't believe my "rating system merely reflects my bias towards sound", it reflects my bias towards the combination of the crafts. It doesn't matter how brilliant your visuals are, if your sound is contradicting what the audience is seeing, the suspension of disbelief, the believability of the scene will be destroyed. An audience is not going to be as understanding of sound as I am, they will not know that the aural perspectives of the SFX are contradicting each other and the visuals, all they will know is that the scene doesn't feel right, that they aren't convinced.
Obviously, the opposite would be just as true, great sound but unconvincing visuals. What I am arguing for is not specifically high quality sound but a better balance of crafts. At the moment, even though there are still improvements which can be made to the visuals, the balance is already too far biased towards the visuals alone. There is far more to be gained in the overall quality of the scene by achieving a better balance and combination of the crafts than in improving the visuals further and making the imbalance even greater! Because of this imbalance, improving the visuals further just improves the visuals but has relatively little effect on the overall quality of the scene, whereas in this particular case, improving the sound doesn't just improve the sound but also improves the whole scene significantly.
But as per your usual - you've provided zero actionable direction, only grievance + principle..
As per usual, I am more than willing to provide actionable direction. But my experience here has been that most either don't believe actionable direction is required and/or don't care, so I have to justify why action is required and we often get so bogged down in the justification we don't get any further! I would be far happier discussing solutions than I am in justifying that there are problems which need solutions! Furthermore, those few who do believe and care, often either don't want or don't have the money to outsource the problem to someone who know what they are doing or to spend the time and effort to learn how to do it themselves, unless exceptionally luckily, that actionable direction happens to be incredibly quick and easy!
>> WHAT should LDS do to make his gunshots sound better? ... Real pistol shots are a very short loud "Crack!" Sounds like two pieces of pine board being slapped together. Hardly cinematic, but then again I did state "Just like with the acting: MUCH hyperbole", which applies to almost all aspects of final product for the audience.
Yes, standing close to a weapon being fired you tend to hear just a short loud crack, which as you say doesn't sound very cinematic. Standing further away from a weapon being fired the sound develops low frequency content (due to sound reflections and high frequency absorption), more of that cinematic boom. To make his gunshots (and sound in general) better, he needs to consider the aural perspective of the sounds he is working with a great deal more. In this particular case, we have a medium close visual perspective, LDS could source a loud crack gunshot SFX and layer it with a bit of low frequency boom, to make it more cinematic but not appear too distant. He could then wrap the whole thing up with some quite close perspective reverb. Also, a more realistic balance between the gun being cocked and the gunshot itself. You can bend reality a fair bit depending on what you are trying to achieve artistically but having the gun's mechanism appear to be pretty much the same volume as the gunshot itself is bending reality well beyond breaking point, especially in this case, as the gun is visually much closer to the audience when it is being fired than when it is being cocked.
G
and about the smoke... yeah it came with the muzzle flash. I adjusted to collors and made it black and white so it kind of dissipated, I noticed that as well. But that is a lesson to learn for the next time 
Thanks! 
Right back atcha, G!
