i think a lot of the perception of brands is based on the top of the line, even though the vast majority of consumers buy low or middle of the line. are ford, chevy, toyota, etc wasting money on their various hugely expensive racing programs? probably not
leupold used to be widely regarded as making good higher end scopes. there weren't many large competitors though. names like US Optics, may have been much better, but they probably never even sold 1% of what leupold did, so it's hard to really compare in a fair and meaningful way.
but over the past 15 years, clearly, at least half a dozen big names raced past leupold on the top end. if you go back just 2-3 years, leupold was selling scopes for $6000-8000 that still weren't as good as a $2000 vortex gen2 razor. that's particularly painful when you have a lot of the consumers of the higher end stuff gathering at the same events and putting their gear through the same course of fire. when someone's expensive thing goes down, everyone hears about it, and then a lot of people explain it away due to circumstance, or move en masse to a different brand. this is why you see such giant swings in actions, triggers, scopes etc in just a year on charts like what the pros use.
I think that is what really affects people's perception. it's much different on the sub $500 market. there are many orders of magnitude more consumers, and they don't get together. they individually hunt, or plink at a range, or let their safe queen gather dust. there's no opportunity to objectively compare performance outside the gun store. so who's to say whether this brand or that brand is more reliable? everyone has a story of one breaking, but what were they doing when it broke?
i think you can also see this in brands that don't compete on the high end. nikon, sightron, meopta and others might be better than leupold in the <$500 market or <$1000 market but nobody would ever say they're the gold standard or the best ever!!! because they don't even compete in the NF, S&B, Hensoldt, Swarovski, Tangent Theta, Khales league.
at this point, if I were Leupold marketing VP, I'd probably put a lot of thought into following the lead of the japanese auto companies when they created infinity, acura and lexus. Leupold is so far out of their league on the top end, i wonder if their brand can recover, or if they would be better off creating a new high end brand, and let Leupold focus on being the best in the <$500 market.