I'm not sure what you mean by amused by USA hunters, but perhaps our scope needs/trends are driven by the type of hunting we do, meaning mostly daytime hunting, compared to what I've understood about European hunters who apparently hunt a lot in relatively low light (night hunting ?) conditions, so the need for 50mm + objective sized lenses aren't a real concern or need for us, whereas you guys perhaps need all the brightness you can muster. We went through a little fad back in the 90's where lots of hunters here were buying 50mm+ objective lens scopes but hunters lost interest/need for these larger scopes and went back to the more traditional configurations, such as 3.10x40, 2.5-10x40/42, 6x scopes with 42mm objectives as so forth. The scope makers, who from what I've been told do tend to cater to the American market, from a business standpoint, as from what I've been told, we are the largest market as far as buying optics whether that be scopes, bino's or spotters cause we have the largest number of hunters, so, Meopta and everyone else, are a business and business's have to make a profit so that's why they listen to out trends the most.
As a side note, when you stated something about "driven hunts", am I to assume that this method is similar to what we call, pushes or drives which are done during daylight hours ? I'm going to assume so as I read in your post that the scopes used for these type hunts has much smaller objective size lenses.
The 5 to 6 zoom ratio scopes have been around here for 5-10 years, and started out with Bushnell Elite 6500 30mm scopes and then others got on the bandwagon as they do seem to offer much greater versatility for the guy who may not be able to afford numerous rifles, so with these you can use a favorite rifle from short range to pretty longer range hunting situations.
