Regardless of the condition the item was in when it left the shipper, and regardless of the packing; during shipping, a product inside a shipping box is exposed to strong forces that it would never be exposed to in normal use. It gets thrown around, it gets slammed around... that's life. But also, scopes, in general, have a significant failure rate anyway.
So I agree with you, that if you don't want to deal with Vortex, that's entirely your choice in the matter... So you can send the scope back to CL, get a refund and buy from someone else....you're done.
But if you have an aversion to dealing with Vortex as a company, to the point that you don't want to deal with their CS department, it's likely not a great idea to buy one of their products in the first place.
