my concern is if I get the full E conversion whether or not my pistol would still be reliable enough for self defense/carry
On my personal 97BE I ran it 1,000 rounds without any cleaning, using dirty hard cast bullets with a grease grove. The pistol was filthy at the end of this test. Did not have a single malfunction. During my load development, I decided to run it to see what failed and why.
At 5,500 rounds(with -0- malfunctions of any kind to this point) I began to have some erratic feed issues. I replaced the recoil spring and and mag spring (I used only 1 mag during the entire 7,000 round span), then ran it anther 1,500+ rounds.
So no, making a super accurate pistol has no influence on reliability. Les Baer, Wilson, Nighthawk, Ed Brown, etc. match fit their barrels just like we do.