I don't think you were alone with that, and I think a lot of guys still think that way.  that honestly never occurred to me.  My first centerfire rifle was a .303 British No.5 Jungle Carbine.  I don't recall thinking much about the recoil.  I kind of assumed it was what it was, and everything else was similar.  That rifle got me started with the .303 British.  I've owned maybe eight (?) rifles in this caliber.  The worst recoil for me was a Mosin-Nagant Model 38 (think Model 44 without bayonet).

That's rather impressive! I have 4 Swiss Schmidt Rubin rifles, only missing maybe 3 variants: 1893, 1896/11, and the K31 Sniper (if I ever find that one, I'll be paying a pretty penny for it).

I don't even remember the Swiss M1893 off the top of my head.

I am probably going to look at Swiss Handguns soon (yeah, should be fun... ) although they don't really get the blood flowing. The 1892 Revolver has my interest as does the SIG P210. I've owned a P220... and P225 so not really enthused about getting those again. We'll see.

I wouldn't even think about the P220 and P225 in conjunction with other Swiss handguns from the era you're considering because they are different as night and day.  the P210 has absolutely nothing in common with those later P-series pistols.  Nothing!

I did run into a fairly worn out Spanish Mauser ...  ...Short-hand and conjecture taken on my part I know, but that's the general sense I got out of how the US viewed the 1893 -1895 Spanish Mausers.

It actually entirely fair.  And it was not just the US, it was the British as well, who ran into the Mauser-armed Boers at almost the exact same time--literally the SPAM War ended in 1898 and the Boer War started the same year and ended in 1902.  By the time the Boer War ended the Americans had already been working on a replacement for the Krag!  Conversely, it took the British a dozen years of plodding to come up with a new rifle design.  The Bris came up with a fine rifle, the Pattern 13, and a fine new cartridge, the .276 Enfield, which was a high-stepping 7mm (sound familiar), but this pesky little dust up that became known as the "Great War" (then, a couple decades later was renamed by history as "World War I" because a second dust-up stared in Europe) got in the way of implementing the new British rifle.

I won't go on about the Fabulous Pattern 13.  It essentially died on the vine--was rechambered for the current .303 British battle rifle cartridge, was issued in some numbers after an American source was found to build them, but the troops were oddly enough mentally wedded to their SMLE rifles and the P14 faded away, as did the .276 Enfield cartridge.  The ballistics of the .276 Enfield was to be a 165gr bullet at about 2800fps, so very nearly the same as the .280 Remington of today!

The Brits liked that concept, however, and I might add that in the post WWII days when developing a new rifle and cartridge for all of NATO was in everyone's minds, the Brits wanted to go with another 7mm, the 280 British, which they wanted to chamber in their new, EM-2 bullpup rifle.  To appease the US military the Brits even made the case head of the 280 Brit slightly larger to match the case head size of the .30-06, but ultimately of course, NATO selected the 7.62x51 cartridge, and the 280 British died.  Interestingly the 280 Brit is varry similar to the 308x1.5 cartridge, only slightly more powerful.  The Brits loaded it with a 139gr bullet to about 2550fps, but it was capable of more power.