And yet the US view prevailed. Money speaks louder than common sense. The M14 is probably the most conservative design for asemi auto rifle you could come up with after the war. Placed along side a FAL or a G3 it seem to be from an earlier age.
Indeed, with the US likely supplying the alliance and Churchill coming back to PM-ship and settling things on their end for the Americans it was effectively a done deal.
The French persisted with their own caliber and designs, but they basically just built the rifle they had designed pre-war and continued with their other pre-war designs until eventually bowing to NATO standard in the 1960s. The FAL really isn't an innovative design either, it was based on a pre-war project and is very similar to the SVT-40, the Soviet pre-war SLR, and the G43 rifle the Germans developed based on the SVT. The G3 is the most innovative one of the lot, but even then the operating system was not really meant for a full power, high pressure battle rifle cartridge.
Meanwhile the M14 has a more effective operating system than the FAL or G3 (short stroke, rotating bolt is basically the modern gold standard for a military rifle), but the overall design and build quality needed a serious upgrade (I mean seriously, no inline stock or pistol grip?). Even a muzzle brake would have made the rifle controllable in automatic fire.