I don't believe the free market would ever have produced the heavy presses. The coordination problem between making designs that use the heavy press and the investment to make the presses is essentially the prisoner's dilemma - each actor reaps a large reward if they both commit but loses massively if only they commit. The outcome is that they don't commit, especially if you add in real-world factors like alternate uses of the investment that competition tends to force the businesses involved into. The only hope would be something vertically integrated that can commit both, but there's no particular reason to believe that such an enterprise could enter into the market.

The free market probably could and would have optimized the situation at hand. Machining would have become cheaper, solutions to the fastener issues mentioned would be found and so on. This might even end up being better than the heavy presses - that's a technical question not an economic one - although the article makes it sound like the forging solution really is inherently superior.