I think a good way to think about the ideal role of bullpups is like carbines in pre-WW2 military use. Infantry - people whose purpose is to shoot their gun at the enemy - got rifles; any sort of auxiliaries like artillery crews and cavalry got carbines, because they prioritized compactness a lot more than regular infantry.
If I were equipping a new army, that's how I'd do it. Infantry would get normal-layout rifles - not necessarily with a "full-length" barrel, but still action-in-front layout. Everyone who is only shooting a rifle if things are going wrong gets a bullpup. Vehicle crews, artillery crews, any kind of support staff, they need a gun but they don't need a super-slick perfect death machine, they need something that's small and easily stowed because that's how the weapon will spend 99.999% of its time. For them, the disadvantages of a bullpup don't outweigh the benefit. (I'm undecided on paratroops, APC crews or other "main job is shooting this thing but we really care about overall length" infantry, they could go either way depending on the exact rifles in question)
All those disadvantages are, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor. Ambidextrous shooting only matters at all in urban warfare, and it's not like it renders the weapons useless there. Clearing malfunctions is hard even in some normal-layout rifles, and I think you're good as long as you can quickly clear common malfunctions and you can get the reliability high enough that the hard-to-clear malfunctions only happen statistically. And as Ian said, reload speed is just a matter of training, there's no physical reason why it would be slower.
I also suspect there's some way to eliminate those problems. If we could eject downward, that would fix both of them, but that means we'd have to move the magazine, and I can't think of a good place to put it. With smaller cartridges, a P90-style magazine-on-top could work, but I don't think that's an option for 5.56mm-class.
The issue with giving your vehicle crews / support staff / etc bullpups because theyre 'good enough' is that the entire line of reasoning falls apart once you look at the price of actually outfitting those troops.
9 times out of 10, outfitting your forces with bullpups even sparingly will cost more than simply giving them cut down AR15s.
Why are bullpups intrinsically more expensive? There's a few extra parts for transferring the trigger pull to the action but I see no fundamental reason why a bullpup has to be significantly more expensive. And this is backed up by all the militaries using bullpups as standard issue - France has the FAMAS, UK has the L85, a bunch of countries adopted the AUG, China has a bunch that I can never remember the acronyms for. So clearly they can't be that much more expensive. I suspect they're way more expensive on the civilian market, or maybe if you're buying in small lots, or if your weapons procurement is more about corporate handouts than procuring weapons, but if you're equipping an army, I see no reason why a bullpup would be more expensive in any meaningful way. (Feel free to prove me wrong, though)
A P90 or other PDW might also be good for auxiliary troops, I didn't actually think about just using one, but ammunition commonality might be more important in a military context. If you adopted a 5.7mm-style cartridge as your pistol round, using an SMG in the same would make a lot of sense, but if you're sticking with 9mm or anything like that, I think you'd rather use your rifle cartridge than your pistol cartridge for your auxiliaries.
Im sure its because theres a lot more machinery to produce something like the AR platform than something like the MTAR platform. Think about it, the US military is a massive juggernaut in the world, and the M4 platform is the staple for all the branches of the military. This is ignoring the US politics side of the M4 program, with potential replacements such as the XM8 being lobbied against by Colt, which has a gigantic presence in the political sphere of the US government.
Honestly it feels at this rate, the question feels more like "Why not bullpups?"
But that would also be an issue if you were to adopt a new platform in a traditional layout. If you're a small-ass army or paramilitary force, you'd be buying an off-the-shelf rifle - but you could still get bullpup if you wanted, it would just be an AUG or something instead of an AR or AK. And if you're a big nation's military, the cost of machine tools is irrelevant - at your order size, they'd have to buy new ones to replace all the ones they're about to wear out filling your order. All that does is shift the scheduled delivery back a bit.
If the US Army were to say "we want a new rifle, bullpup, in a new 6.4mm semi-caseless cartridge we came up with yesterday, 1.2 cubit-long barrel, feeding from a side-mounted helical magazine", you can bet they would be able to get it, and absent any fuckery with the bid process, they'd be able to get the same sort of deal as if they'd said "make us some more M4s".
Going to call you out there. They redid the tests and the M4 still had the highest failure rate out of all. The XM8 and FN SCAR came straight from the manufacturer, while the HK416 and M4 were from an armoury. These guns were all inspected for wear before and after the test. The XM8 had the least stoppages, followed by the SCAR, then the HK416 and finally the M4. The M4 had over 3 times as many stoppages as the HK416. When they redid the test, the M4 had 1.5 times as many stoppages as the HK416, and stoppages were very clearly related due to cleaning. The rifles fired 120 rounds before being subjected to a dust torture test. After this fired another 120 rounds, and then it went into the dust again. Repeat this, but completely clean and lube the gun every 600 rounds. The last firing cycles before cleaning were terrible for the M4 and it suffered many stoppages.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/211377/a47ef124-3f75-4e47-8e0b-6d2ba27999df/image.png
They actually tested the M4 3 times, but the 1st time was even worse. Increasing the amount of lube severely increased reliability, and that was used for the 2nd and 3rd tests.
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