Yes, of course there are better ways.
It is nearly 30 years old.
It has all kinds of flaws. So does every marker in the convenient light of hindsight.
Put in another way, most of the engineers now producing top-shelf stuff were alive in 1990 when the automag came out.
Yet none of the modern designs, produced by these people (or anyone else), came out in 1990.
And just as it would be unreasonable for us to expect them to have produced such things back then, it is also a little unfair to expect something from back then to answer criticisms leveled against it today.
It is no longer under scrutiny. It has earned its place in history in a way that most markers never will.