Most of my scopes are Leupolds. Can't say anything about other brands. I prefer their AO over SF by a wide margin. Some of that may be how those are packaged / combined with other features. I prefer 40 mm objectives and I prefer 1" tubes.
With the 1" tube, 40mm objective, AO scopes I own, once the initial focus has been set, I can get a pretty decent guestimate of distances just by fiddling with the AO 'til the image is sharp, then read what it says on the dial. I can also set the dial to whatever distance my Leica rangefinder says and be pretty well nuts-on.
I haven't had that experience with their SF / 30mm scopes. The numbers on the dials seem to be entirely arbitrary. IMHO that sucks.
At the moment the only SF Leupold I have any interest in is a 30mm 3.5-10X ... this is because they don't offer the 3.5-10X with AO. Sometimes less than perfect is better than nothing at all.
Tom
