I remember the push that bigger scopes were what you needed to be any good at anything to do with shooting and hunting.
I remember it started about 20 years ago really.
I remember being pushed by advertising and marketing, everywhere we looked in retail situations. Scopes were getting better and better really fast, optically-wise, to a point a few years ago where I think they reached a point where advances are not really advances at all.
The brands regarded as the kings of clear and beautiful bright images in a strong sleek size took second place to the new monsters with 34mm, now 35mm tubes to fit in the huge drop of bullets falling from the sky way out. It seems Asian quality is easier to be acceptable when the packages become larger.
Nothing wrong with wanting gear that makes what you like doing easier.
I wonder how todays shooters, to which a 5-25x massive 35mm scope is on the low-end, would be able to understand how in 1995, we used to compete on the 1000yd range with semi-auto rifles on pop-up targets, moving targets, and steel poppers that are only 200mm wide and 400mm high on sticks, at 500yds under timers, using the Jap tasco 4x scopes. They would laugh.
It's just that this type of gear is so restrictive to use for hunting, to the point where people miss most opportunities because of hugely restrictive field-of-view, very fussy and restrictive eyeboxes - fine when you are at a bush-bench or on a fancy-pants shooting mat on a bipod looking for your target put up at 1000yds. That's when you have the time to find the target, screw with the parallax - absolutely essential with high magnification and distance. Especially as Asian manufacturers just have trouble with getting clarity around the edges and getting an image that doesn't look like when checking the chimney in the kitchen wood stove.
That's why I thought that add was funny, because it sums up all that's todays bullsh*t marketing.
Hunting scopes are not target scopes, although a good skilled shooter can use a quality hunting optic for shooting longer ranges, the other way around is quite pointless.
Who the heck is "Bluey" anyway?
I remember there was a bloke called "Warrigal Mick" who used to pop up in shooting magazines 20 years ago with all these "tips" which quite often were thinly disguised ads.
Then there were the gun mag "reviews" on gun stuff, especially cheaper Asian scopes where if you really tried, you could read between the lines that the reviewer wasn't impressed but his job meant he had to please the advertisers.
I remember Nick Harvey writing an article once how so much of his writing on gun gear reviews was done through basically gritted teeth, and that at times he felt like a cheap hooker. My paraphrasing here.
It's so blatantly cheap, paid-for advice now in the shooting "journalist" industry now.
Years ago, articles that were just paid ads were titled in small print up top of the page as "infomercials" but not now.
Look at Sporting Shooter online on YouTube and the editor doing all the reviews now. A journalist initially from the dying demand for motorcycling/motoring media, parachuted sideways into a role to hang onto his job suddenly becomes a "lifelong hunter and firearms expert". And, for necessity to keep a dying magazine alive the most crumbly piece of cheaply made gear is a "game changer".
Look at the SSAA posted magazine "The Report". Every edition in the last how long? features one, if not two, paid-for articles on Zerotech optics. Then, if they are reviewing some rifle, the scope on that gun is Zerotech too, and half of the rifle article becomes another Zerotech fan-boy description. I suppose when you find people who are easily bought off, you just keep sending them free gear.
It's so easy for the companies to pay for all these ads and handing over scopes and binos for free to writers, to charge $1000 for a Chinese scope here in Aus for something the importers of a brand that is made by a massive mass-production Chinese optics factory for $150 each leaves a lot for market saturation and freebies galore.
What other explanation is there, for the shooting public who mean so well and rely on good advice, get sucked in to buying gear that's so limiting to what they are doing. And they will never know how difficult they have made it for themselves, because they haven't tried the gear that makes it so much easier. People are pretty good at adapting to something if they are steered up the wrong road.
what i'm trying to say is the 6.5x55 is the optimum case size for that bore . IMHO anyway 
