I don’t think they’ve changed much at all. If anything, they’ve gotten better over the years. The glass is nice, they look great (I still don’t know why other manufacturers can’t make scopes that look as nice as Leupolds), the naming system is marketable, warranty is great, USA company, etc.
For me, coming of age in the 80s and 90s, they were the benchmark. The problem is, most of the people I knew back then didn’t shoot year-round. We, like a lot of hunters, would shoot during deer season, then put our rifles back in the safe. Come next season, we would all head out to “sight in our rifles”. They usually required some adjustment (which should’ve been a huge red flag, because at what point did they go from being “sighted in” to needing adjustment? Seriously, was it while it was sitting in the safe or was it right before you shot that doe in the leg?) Anyway, sight in day was when the real fun started. One click very rarely equaled 1/4 inch at 100 yards. Form’s description in one of his Loopy tests was spot on. Shoot a round, adjust several MOA and shoot again. No change. Then adjust some more and give her the ol’ tap tap tap and shoot again. Now too far the other way. So on and so forth, chasing that POI.
The problem was, we didn’t dial back then and so scopes didn’t need to dial well. Leupold knew that with enough coin turns and enough tapping we would eventually get it figured out. The old timers used to comment that if you bumped your scope on something or left it in the safe too long, it would eventually wander and we just accepted it as a fact of life and kept buying the next version, figuring that when the name changed from vari X to VX with Roman numerals to VX 3 or whatever, things must be improving because the glass was, in fact, a little bit better.
Enough of this BS. With the exception of their high-end Mark whatever stuff (which is itself suspect, from what I’ve read here and elsewhere, and experienced with friend’s rifles) you still have to deal with inaccurate adjustments, turret tapping, and wandering zero on the VX line. They’ve had decades to get their act together, and they haven’t been able to figure out or been willing to bring to market what a growing number of other companies are providing. Like a toxic girlfriend that you have a hard time leaving, they’ve gotten by on good looks and good memories for too long.
