Now that there are plenty of good and more affordable upgrade options available a pretty awesome sniper rifle can be made fairly cheap. Buy a VSR variant for around $50-75, put in about $250 in upgrades, diy and lots of tuning and you have a gun that can hit out to around 300 feet. I've had a couple VSRs and they are still probably my favorite platform to tinker with and tune. So far I haven't fully upgraded one but it is definitely much cheaper than it used to be.
That's for sure, my bolt gun isn't cheap but it is cheap;) It's a TM VSR10 G-spec, which of course wasn't cheap. Though I've gone on the cheap for my upgrades and substituted time for money in this case. Lots of tuning, though running a 45 deg sear and piston happily for allot of rounds. Recently replaced the stock piston after 10,000 rounds or so with an action army version and a fresh set of SHS sears just for good measure. But shooting 525fps or so I've gotten confirmed kills past 100 yards with it running .43g Ajax BB's.
I've long considered building another bolt gun;) Since I do really enjoy the challenge of running that gun, but the dark side of AEG long range builds drew me in a while back and I built out an old CA M16A2 to shoot 510fps and I've gotten nearly the same accuracy lacking slightly maybe 5-10 yards shorter than max on the bolt gun. But with semi auto it's dang effective compared to the bolt gun. At the end of the day I enjoy both though.
I will say though it's much cheaper to build out virtually anything custom these days than it used to be. Heck parts if your using Clandestine or Brill are roughly a quarter in most cases what we used to pay for them;)
On the CA G36K I always liked the long G36 I've never warmed to HK guns in use. I love the looks, I want to love using them and something ergonomically just doesn't jive with me for whatever reason. Doesn't stop me from buying them and hoping I'll love them;) Since I've got an old TM G36c right now and an ICS MP5A4 too, neither that I love, both are great guns;) And seeing that made me think back to the old days of Arnies Airsoft, and it's sort of sister site Airsoft Players, though that's getting off topic;)
Luke