This is a great thread, and, as usual,
@koshkin and others bring up great points. One big thing that I've personally found is that, no matter how nice the optic is in terms of features and performance, if the reticle isn't great, people won't buy it. Case in point, the original Nightforce NX8 1-8 was a capable optic at a good price point for what it was... with a reticle that was NOT what many shooters wanted. Fast forward to more recently, and NF realized that they already had a winner of a reticle in the ATACR 1-8, and that they might sell more of their NX8 if they put a well-designed tree reticle in it that people already liked and were using. What a wild idea!
The other issue with LPVO/MPVO has been totally discussed ad nauseum: dependent on use case, different people want different things, especially related to reticles. I see this being especially prevalent as it relates to different philosophies of use. For some, reticles are used as rulers, and there is an interest in being able to process as much data as possible through them. The real magic here comes from that last phrase "an interest in being able to process as much data as possible through them", as we all process things differently, and, dependent on context, we all want to process faster, slower, more/less precisely, or observe different metrics or phenomena through them relative to what type of data we want to process... because it is more or less relevant to us dependent on context.
What this means in the big picture is that some people will like certain reticles more than others, or find more relevance in a Mildot or TMR than a tree-style reticle. Some people might like chevrons, while others may prefer horseshoes. Some may want angular units of measurement, whereas others may like rough calculations built into their reticles. Unless you are required to use and become proficient with a certain optic and setup, find what works for you and learn it cold.
For companies, it all comes down to sales: how many people will buy my product so that I can make a profit. For consumers, this typically means that
someone is coming up with these features and reticles, and that someone might be a very niche end-user, or it might be an engineer or technical SME who thinks that this thing should work well and customers will like it (and like it enough that a company will bet on the market liking it).
Very rarely do you see companies truly design and release a product that has had significant focus placed on the development, testing, and evaluation cycle as a multistep process include wider focus on training, design rationale, and significant input from experts and laypersons alike who are exterior to the company. Because this is such a rarity, many companies aren't able to articulate to their commercial customers just why they did what they did, and the rationale behind it, which is a real pity, as historically, companies that can do this well tend to build better products, and attract the right customers for what they've built.