Well, it depends on your intended use. If 90% of your shooting is going to be within 50 yards or so, that's a no brainer. Go with a red dot. As your use case extends beyond 50 yards, magnification becomes more and more useful and in some cases, necessary.
If all you want is something to shoot at well defined larger targets on a flat range where environmentals don't play much of a factor, then you can get away with a red dot.
If you're going to be dealing with things like environmentals where the light is messing with your eyes or there is heavy vegetation and you need to identify what you're shooting at, magnification becomes more important. The more difficult the shot, the more handy magnification becomes.
As a practical matter, magnifiers are great for extending the range of a red dot, but are far from ideal. Even a mediocre LPVO will far out perform the best magnifier in terms of magnification.
I run two rigs with a similar intended purpose, which is to be able to effectively engage target at distances to 400 yards. On one, I run an ACOG/RDS stack. On the other, I run a 1-8x NX8. I've found them to work well in most situations. Of the two, I prefer the ACOG setup. It's small, light and the glass is super good. I usually grab the NX8 setup when I know we're gonna be taking more low percentage shots.
Sorry, Im gonna call BS on this. Maybe on a flat range, on large targets in ideal conditions, you might get lucky and hit the target 2 times out of 20, but unless you are very talented, I can't see holding around 10.5 mils of elevation and something around 1/3 of that in windage with a 2 moa red dot with any sort of consistency. This is one of those things I'd need to see to believe.
