No, I am not on a translation committee, but my Greek prof is on the ESV and NIV committees. As we translated, he made notes of things we uncovered, to take back to the committee. He also explained why certain decisions were made by both committees. And that ESV was not a fresh translation, but rather stuck to "traditional" translations, meaning it tends to follow the KJV.
Wescott and Hort are simply not the best Greek texts for the NT. Like I said, Nestle- Åland and UBS use ALL the manuscripts, and the list EVERY variation. And which variations are closest to the original, by following the mistakes down through the manuscripts as they are copied and re-copied.
The Byzantine or so-called Textus Receptus (TR) are in the majority there is no doubt. But they are much later than the best manuscripts. That is because the Byzantines spoke Greek, so they were able to get lots of copyists to copy the manuscripts. The four unintentional errors that copyists made are:
1. Errors of Sight - As the scribes looked back and forth from the text to what they were copying, they made mistakes. Sometimes they confused letters, or divided words wrongly (the oldest Greek manuscripts had no spaces between words.) They repeated words, accidentally skipped letters, words or section is (ie copied the same thing twice) or changed the order of letters in a word or words in a sentence. For example in Codex Vaticanus, in Gal. 1:11, a scribe accidentally wrote "to euaggeliov" (the gospel) three times in succession.
2. Errors of Hearing. When scribes copied manuscripts through dictation, errors of hearing were made. For example, vowels or diphthongs were misheard, as in Matt 2:6 in Codex Sinaiticus, where ek sou (from you) has been wrongly heard, and written as "eks ou" (from whom). We make similar mistakes in English, for instance, writing "night" when someone says "knight."
3. Errors of Writing. Sometimes scribes introduced errors into texts simply by writing the wrong thing. For example, in Codex Alexdrinus, at John 13:37, a scribe accidentally wrote "dunasai moi" rather than "dunamai soi."Rather than saying to Jesus, "whey can't I follow you now?" Peter now queries "why can't you follow me now?"
4. Errors of Judgement. Sometimes a scribe exercised poor judgement by incorporating marginal glosses (ancient footnotes) into the body of the text, or by incorporating similar unintentional corrupting influences. In the 14th century Codex 109, for example, an incompetent scribe has apparently copied continuous lines of text from a manuscript that listed the genealogy of Jesus (Luke 3:23-38) in two columns. The resulting genealogy has all the family relations scrambled, even listing God as the son of Aram.
The six intentional errors are only 5% and represent intentional activity on the part of the scribes:
1. Revising Grammar and Spelling. In an attempt to standardize grammar or spelling, scribes corrected what they perceived as orthographic or grammatical errors in the text they were copyin. For example, John originally put the nominative case after the preposition "apo" in Revelation 1:4. Later scribes have inserted a genitive form.
2. Harmonizing Similar Passage. Scribes had a tendency to harmonize parallel passages and introduce uniformity to stylized expressions. For example, details from the same incident in multiple gospels might be included when copying any one gospel. Even today, Greek students often unintentionally insert "Lord" or "Christ" when translating a passage with the name "Jesus." They are not intending to promote a "higher" Christology, they are simply conforming their speech to a stylized reference to the Saviour. Ancient scribes behaved in a similar way.
3. Eliminating Apparent Discrepancies and Difficulties. Scribes sometimes "fixed" what they perceived as a problem in the text. Origen perceived a geographical difficult at John 1:28, he changed "Bethany" to "Betharaba."
4. Conflating the text. Sometimes when a scribe knew of variant readings in the manuscript base from which he was copying, he woujld simply include both variants within his copy, conflating them. For example, in Acts 20:28, some early manuscripts read "the church of God,"while others read "the church of the Lord." Later manuscripts conflate these reading as "the church of the Lord and God."
5. Adapting Different Liturgical Tradiitons. In a few isolated places, it is possible that church liturgy (ie stylized prayers or praises) influenced some text additions or wording changes. For example in Matt 6:13 "For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, Amen." Sorry to say that the Catholics got that one right.
6. Making Theoloigcal or Doctrinal Changes. Some scribes made theoloigcal or doctinical changes, either omitting something they saw as wrong, or making clarifying additions. For example, in Matt 24:36, some manuscripts omit the references to the Son's ignorance of the day of his return - a passage that is obviously difficult to understand.
As for the KJV, it relied heavily on Erasmus translation. He only had 7 manuscripts, most of poor quality. Today, we have more than 5800 ancient manuscripts or partial manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. They Byzantine is recognized by scholars as a later conflation of text traditions and not as reliable as eclectic scholarly additions produced by text critics. Although there is a tiny minority of scholars who insist that only one "family" of ancient manuscripts preserves the text, they are aligned mostly with the KJV Only movement. Thus they start with the KJV and then find manuscripts to support the KJV, instead, of critically examine all the manuscripts from all 4 families (Alexandrian, Caesarean, Western and Byzantine.)*
I'm not saying someone can't get saved reading the KJV or grow as a Christian. Just that there are so many mistakes because the translation committee had to rely on much later manuscripts which were rife with copyist errors, as I posted above.
There is much more, but this post is already too long.
*Kostenberger, Merkle and Plummer. Going Deeper with New Testament Greek: An Intermediate Study f the Grammar and Syntax of the New Testament, vv 25; 30-31