One will certainly see a lot of positivity in the media regarding new releases. Either the company is paying for the reviews in one way or another, or the reviewer wants to make some monetary gains/review for a living - and you certainly don't get gear sent to you for review when you shit on the new products.
Back to Vortex. They had a pretty good thing going, fitting their products well into the niches in the market. I don't think that their success warranted trying to increase pricing across the lines though. Too many good, competitive options that are now going to be less.
Got to zero my Gen 3 Razor the other day. The zeroing function is incredibly easy. Consider me a big fan of that.
I bought two of the GEN3's....got out yesterday zero'd and shot 200 rounds through my Vudoo...absolutely love the Zero feature...super easy to zero and can easily dial it in exactly where you want it. As far as glass goes I like it enough that I will be hanging on to these for awhile and I go through scopes like most change their socks. Having owned just about every alpha scope made in the past with the exception of TT I would rank the GEN3 in the top 3 or 4.