In the 60’s & 70’s Leupolds was a good option, the problem is everyone else has improved their scopes but Leupold has not.
IIRC, Leupold upgraded their scopes multiple times since the 1960's and 1970's.
Vari-X II became the Vari-X IIc in 1984.
Vari-X IIc became the VX-I and VX-II n 2001.
VX-I and VX-II were upgraded in 2004.
VX-1 and VX-II became the VX-1 and VX-2 in 2012.
The Freedom series superceded the VX-1 and VX-2 in 2018.
I have room for 100 rifles in the ready rack, around 95 of them have scopes mounted and of the 95, 70 probably have Leupolds mounted. My two current disappointments with Leupold are the usurious price that they are charging for a simple reticle change and the fact that the heavy duplex doesn't appear to be available in a 2-7x33 Freedom.
That didn’t keep up with the competition
In what way?
Tacticool?
New scopes come out of the box with canted reticles for starters. Not adjusting properly, loseing zero and ability to hold zero after several hundred rounds. If you’ve never experienced the leupold shuffle consider yourself very lucky.
I've sent a few old scopes that came to me on rifles back to Leupold to be refurbished, but none for failure. I've never had any of the problems that you've cited, but because I have a large number of rifles, few of them get shot very much. Other than dedicated varmint rifles and rimfires, I doubt that many of them have seen more than 300 rounds fired, some less than 100.
