From what I've seen and heard, earlier guns seemed to be more ammo-sensitive that more recent production models.
Mine was very early and had to be "tweaked" to run reliably, but it has worked well (with decent ammo) ever since. Mine still will not run very cheap ammo reliably, but works fine with several middle-cost loads like CCI and Remington plated ammo. Trigger pull was terrible, so eventually I upgraded to a 2-stage trigger, which made it much easier to shoot well. It's still not a match gun by any stretch of the imagination; most unmodified 10/22s will shoot better with the same ammo.
I shoot mine far less now that I have a pistol-caliber (9mm) AR carbine, which is much more realistic in the recoil department (very similar to 5.56mm/.223), but I'll probably keep it.