I can understand why you'd think that but the riflemen that got into the various rifle companies during the Revolutionary War (primarily from Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia) were not normally "poor as dirt". Reason for that is that most of them had been longhunters, especially the ones in Virginia that I am most familiar with. They would do their "longhunting" for 6 to 9 months a year to harvest deer hides and would hunt for their own families sustenance when the season for harvesting hide closed.
There were huge numbers of deer in the eastern US then because vast populations of Native Americans had been wiped out by illnesses and diseases that they had no resistance or immunity to. Some estimates are that more than 90% of their populations died because of that. Even if that number is way out of whack, the net result was there were comparatively few people hunting deer in the 1600's because deer were a major food source for the Indians and they died. So by the 1700's there had been a major explosion in deer populations .
Longrifles in the 1700's typically cost about 1-year's wages, whereas a smoothbore fowler, like most guns used in New England, at the time cost about 1/4th of that. According to British law, every able-bodied man between the ages of 16 and about 65 had to belong to they local or county militia and had to supply their own firelock (flintlock) in good working order. Smoothbores like a fowler could be used for bird hunting with shot or deer with a lead ball, so they were the most common arm.
But the longrifle allowed a longhunter to kill deer at distances a smoothbores couldn't even imagine. These longhunters were quite proficient in taking deer at 200 to 250-yards. It also allowed for accurate neck and head shots at closer distances, which would result in a "prime hide" because they don't use the neck and the head in the hide. A prime hide has no bullet holes in the hide and commanded a higher selling price. There was a huge market for these deer hides in the 1700's. In fact deer hides were the 2nd largest export from the colony of Virginia to England until the beginning of the war. Tobacco was their #1 export.
With a longrifle that cost about a years wages, a rifleman could make three times the cost of the rifle in the first year and continue to make that rate in subsequent years. That's the main reason we know that they weren't, as a rule, "poor as dirt". I'm sure there were some, but not the ones you found in rifle companies during the Revolutionary War.
We know that they were accurate out to those 200 and 250-yard distances because they had to hit a pumpkin at 200-yards to be accepted into a rifle company. If they couldn't do that, they couldn't be in the rifle company. AND, if too many of them qualified hitting a pumpkin at 200-yards, they would either move the pumpkin out to 250-yards, or depending on the time of year, replace the pumpkin at 200-yards with a smaller target such as an orange. These folks were highly skilled with their open sights (iron sights) and telescopic sights wouldn't be invented for almost another 100-years.
However, with few exceptions, you didn't normally see the heavily decorated longrifles during the Rev War. They appeared after the war in what is called the "Golden Age of the Longrifle." They would typically have a pierced brass patchbox and brass hardware with perhaps a thumb medallion behind the tang of the barrel, weeping hearts inlet around the wrist, small hunting stars on the forearm where the barrel was pinned and often a hunting star or other decoration on the cheek rest. They could also be heavily inlaid with gold or silver wire in the stock.
The Pennsylvania Longrifle from Traditions was my first longrifle and I bought it because it said it was approved for Rev War reenactments by some reenactment group...I never could verify that group. One of the men in my reenactment group was a gun-builder and said that Traditions was a much later rifle design more typical of the Golden Age of Flintlock Longrifles. He also said I probably wouldn't meet any resistance to using it at a reenactment, but if I did, he would loan me one of his fowlers to use at that reenactment. A few years later I bought an Early Lancaster rifle that was Historically Accurate to as early as the 1750's but still not unusual to see during the Rev War. So those heavily decorated longrifles are not really HC/PC for the Revolutionary War, but at least they are not a percussion longrifle.
