Shortround6
Major General
I agree the MAS 36 was obsolete but it was better than a Lebel.
The Madsen M47 was even worse!
But then again the 98k was the competition so the MAS 36 was perfectly ok for its time.
In the squad or platoon setting the Germans were depending on the Machine gun to be the main firepower. Once the MG 34 showed up it had roughly double the firepower of the French LMG ( the practical firepower being dependent on the ability to change barrels and the feed system) so the French were behind the curve on the LMG. So were many other countries but Germany was France's main enemy. The fact that the Italians or the Japanese or the Bulgarians didn't have better rifles and LMGs than the French doesn't really matter. Holding the Italians in the French Alps while Germany overran the rest of country wouldn't save them.
The Germans could afford to have a less than 1st class rifle as they had a 1st class machine-gun. They were introducing the sub-machine gun in numbers. The Germans also didn't waste time/money developing a "new" functionally obsolete rifle. They did go to several less than ideal semi-automatic rifles in trial quantities around the start of the war.
Granted tactics were in flux and many pre-war theories didn't work out in practice but the French rifle offered too few advantages over the old ones and certainly not enough to make up for the LMG.
British had a better combat rifle AND a Better LMG than the French, The quick change barrel on the Bren gun allowed for a much higher deliverable rate of fire (cycle rate actually has very little to do with deliverable firepower).
Fitting the MAS 36 with a magazine system like the SMLE would have at least been some sort of improvement instead of holding onto the status quo.