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Yes to all of this. Those opinions are likely shaped by experience. If you need further convincing:
Most of you are motorist; all motorists know the experience of meeting opposite traffic in the dark and not seeing much beyond the other vehicle's headlights.
In the car, the experience is more acute than with an overly illuminated scope reticle, but it's the same mechanism for the eye.
Considering how knowledgable engineers needs to be in order to build a functional scope, I am sometimes baffled at how little thought is given to the shooters biological limitations; clearly they understand optics!
Your sharp vision is created by the fovea, this is only ø1,5-2mm of your eye and contains 150000-200000 light sensitive receptors. The central-most part of this in only ø 0,15-0,35mm, it contains only cones (no rods/no nightvision) and only about 1000* of these creates the image that your brain will convert to a trigger-reflex. An olympic level shooter can discern about a 2mm shift (0,08") at 50 meters in the sight picture or 4mm/100*.
It's the same 1000 receptors used for every shot. These receptors are light sensitive and have limited stamina (wash out). (All of you have at some time done some sort of parlor-trick illusion image thingie, so you have firsthand experience on how your vision can be manipulated, have after images or seeing movement that isn't there. etc etc
So at least from my design perspective this means:
Yes, an illuminated dot makes sense. There are no rods where the eye creates the image for a trigger reflex.
No, excessive lightning is not good. Why do you want to fight against the rod receptors and degrade image quality? You just spent all that money on lenses with >90% light transmission (in a certain wavelenght) and now you will not let the eye use all of that light?
No, tiny aiming dots makes no sense, they are marginal for the eye. A dot large enough to be easily interpreted/easily converted to a trigger reflex makes sense. I went with "half a bullet diameter every side" which gives the HUNTER the impression of placing the bullet exactly on the dot and it gives the EYE a comfortably sized reference to work with.
Of course there might be errors is my reasoning, but the above was my design decisions and it appears that my desired end-result is mirrored in the user experience.
(*Ways of the rifle 2009 - Buhlmann, Reinkemeier, Eckhardt, Murray, Bindra. Page 200)
@Formidilosus love seeing the reticle images. You might as well post a picture at EVERY magnification possible, it is only a matter of time before someone requests it...
