It's very common to be overmagnified and underscoped, if such word can be used for settling for less than ideal glass and coating quality. Many people are blinded by the numbers, high magnification at a low price and end up buying what's probably the worst choice for most hunting situations. It's not more for less, it's buying scopes that would be more useful as potato gavels than aiming devices.
I've fallen victim to that too. At one time I had a number of medium quality 6-18...6-24 scopes that were ok at the range but useless for hunting in even sparsely wooded areas. The glass wasn't quite up to par either, $300-400 and high magnification ment that image was more often than not distorted in some way and coatings couldn't meet the marketing claims of light transmission.
This is just an opinion, but the best universal hunting scopes I've come across are made by high-end brands, magnification somewhere between 1.5 and 8, with a fairly large diameter objective. Light transmission and clarity are great, FOV at 100 yards is at least 50', sometimes even close to 65, weight is still very bearable and 3-4" eye relief suffices nicely unless you try to do something stupid or mount the scope on a light, heavy recoil magnum rifle. The (discontinued) Zeiss Conquest 1.8-5.5x36 was one of my favorites despite its 50yd parallax, so was (discontinued) Nikon Monarch 1.5-6x42 which is only available as B-300 with a BDC reticle anymore. Kahles, Zeiss, Swarovski and Schmidt & Bender still offer a few models, with or without illuminated reticle or dot. I'd love to see more affordable scopes manufactured in this magnification range, with a relatively large objective, just to be able to justify buying a few more. At $1.5k+ each for high end ones that isn't likely to happen anytime soon.