When I read some of these comments, I also wonder what kind of shooting they do.
Unless someone is doing super high grade long distance target shooting, at some point don't the tiny, incremental differences between one scope and another just become meaningless?
It's like with computers - when they first came out, they were slow enough that I could set something to load and go make a nice ham sandwich while I waited. Then they started to speed up, and you could easily see the difference. But after a while the computers got so fast, they started to be faster than a human brain can even think. And once you're beyond that point, further increases in speed become meaningless, because we literally cannot see the difference. It makes no difference to our brain that, technically, one computer was a millionth of a second faster than another!
In the same way, I have a feeling that once you pass a certain quality threshold - which I suspect almost all mainlstream commercially available scopes today would pass - I suspect that any of the tiny incremental improvements beyond that would be unobservable to most human eyes, and take up only the smallest portion of the pie-chart of excuses for why we just missed that shot!
In other words, I think the average shooter would be hard pressed to really see the differences between your average scopes.
That's why it seems like such a credibility-killing exageration to me when someone will say something totally dismissive, like "it's total junk" . Really? Total junk? Both those scopes are probably - in the grand scheme of things - better than anything our ancestors could have hoped for. They're both more than good enough for the average shooter's needs. Sure, one might actually be a little bit better than the other, but that hardly makes the other "total junk" ! The guy who finishes fourth at the olympics may not get a medal, but he's still better than almost every other person in the world!
