We had brand new MPiK-74Ns in our arms room for foreign weapons training/familiarization, and they were awfully well put together for AKs (fit/finish better than the Polish AKMs and Bulgarian AR-M1s and RPK-74s we also had . . . and we won't even talk about the stack of Century Arms imported Romanian AKs we also had). Main issue I had with them was that folding stock is just ridiculously short, even for combat marksmanship sort of shooting. (Have heard that the Poles, who used the same stock, universally despised it on their version of the 74 as well.)
Raises the interesting idea of Warsaw Pact troops feeling that there were better and worse (or cooler/less cool) versions of the AK. With almost everyone in the front line states running some sort of AK-74, I wonder if you'd get East German AKs being prized trophies among Soviet troops, or Poles ditching their weapons for Soviet 74s any chance they got, etc. (And of course the AKSU would be extremely coveted I'm sure . . .)