Springfield has announced their new 9mm single-stack, the XDe:
http://www.springfield-armory.com/xde-features/On the one-hand, I'm intrigued by the "low-effort slide", as while my grip-strength is
sufficient for normal slides, too much monkeying with them gets my hands shaky which doesn't do great things for my accuracy. On the other, I don't do well with DA/SA actions. I love the principle: long deliberate DA pull for first shot, short clean SA for follow-up. As I learned quickly my first two days at Front Sight several years ago though, the transition in finger-action between the first two shots messed me up every time, resulting in bad accuracy during rapid fire. I managed to forget my gun one day during the training (impressive, I know), so I had to rent a Glock, which I did so much better with I turned into a DAO acolyte, though I've since moved to Springfields as the grips fit me better.
You could certainly carry it SA cocked-and-locked with the safety on and use it that way. I don't have any 1911s (heresy!) or similar SA guns though, so I've not enough experience with those to know if that would work well for me.
Also wondering if the slide has some sort of mechanism that reduces the opening effort, but closing force is still high enough for reliability, or if they just reduced spring power hoping to ride a fine line between reduced opening force and still chambering a round . . .