A heavy unwieldy scope with too much magnification is not just something I don’t need in that situation, it is an impediment to getting the job done.
My cousin has a Nightforce scope on one of his rifles. I've looked through it. It has great glass and appears to be built like a tank. But it's also damn near the size of the Hubble telescope, weighs a ton, and completely f#*#s up the balance and feel of what would otherwise be a fine hunting rifle. I guess chit like that doesn't matter if all you are going to do is shoot from a benchrest at stationary metal targets. Not much of a stalking rig however.
And that's what you can't get the knob twisters to understand. There is still a place for a scope that is light weight with it's primary quality features being the quality of the glass and lens coatings. In other words A HUNTING SCOPE. A lot of target scopes are not good low light scopes. Now you can get a target scope that also has fantastic glass and great low light performance but added to all the target features already on that scope you will damn well pay for it.
30 mm main tubes, heavier erector sytems with micro accurate click adjustments, ballistic plex reticles, tall turrent knobs with a zero stop system, side adjustable parallax, first focal plane reticle, 4 to 24 power zoom, etc. etc. all add either expense or weight to a scope. Some add both. All of the features I just listed are not only unneeded for a hunter like myself but as mentioned before can actually make a scope less suitable for my needs. So why would I want them and why in the absolute hell would I pay more for them? What I need in a scope is to hold zero, not fog up, have good glass, good lens coatings and if possible not weigh frigging 2.5 pounds in the process. I can still get just the things I need for a hunting scope from some of the models Leupold offers and at a decent price.
I also must be the luckiest SOB on earth because I have owned 6 Leupolds and never had one that I had trouble sighting in or that would lose it's zero. And yet you come here and get the impression that the Leupold failure rate is about 85%. LOL! I particularly like the stories by the guys who had 6 of them crap out on them. Hmmm, you had 4 scopes of a particular brand turn out to be unusable pieces of chit and yet you still purchased a 5th and a 6th made by the same people? Seems kinda odd. I think I would have bailed on them after number 2 failed. Me thinks I detect the faint whiff of bullchit in some stories like that.
