Genuinely curious, what’s wrong with an 8x, erector? Break it down Barney style
Nothing wrong with it per se but understand that the higher the erector the more difficult it is to make a forgiving scope. High erector scopes have a history of being more finicky than their lower erector counterparts and by more finicky I mean with parallax, DOF and eyebox. Case in point, take the NF NX8 2.5-20x50 (8x erector) and the NF ATACR 4-16x42 (4x erector) while the 2.5-20 is pretty impressive, the 4-16 is a more forgiving scope making for a better experience behind the scope. Keep in mind the sport optics world is a balance between feature and compromise, some of us are willing to accept the compromises in order to gain the features while others are not. Interestingly enough, Kahles (in their marketing) says due to the large eyepiece design their 8x scopes have very generous eyebox's and I've heard mixed reports about that from the K328i, but the K328i was also hampered by a 50mm objective whereas the K540i is using a 56mm objective and larger objectives typically lend towards more forgiving eyebox experience. Also, high erector scopes have a tendency to "get dark" towards the top of the magnification range, again, Kahles is saying that IQ is superb at 40x but I stopped believing in marketing hype a long time ago after my own testing proved a lot of marketing claims to be false or misleading; again, that's not to say this scope won't be stellar but until it starts getting into the wild and some reliable comparisons are made to TT, ZCO and Schmidt I will keep my expectations in check.
One thing is for certain, Kahles is pushing the limits of contemporary optical design, similar to what March has been doing for years. I think these innovations ultimately help the industry even if some of the designs make for a more frustrating experience vs. more traditional designs.