I agree with your sentiments. I think Leupold should put more effort into their middle and upper end products and drop the low end crap. If they put the same quality of glass in their VX-III line that Zeiss puts into its Conquest line I'd probably buy nothing but VX-III's. They're trying to be too many things to too many people. They should have put their efforts into finding better glassand coatings instead of developing thathideous VX-L monstrosity.