I have two scopes that are 15 or so years old.  One is a Leupold Vari-X III 6.5 - 20 and the second is a Leupold Vari-X III 8.5- 25.  Both were purchased sometime in the mid to late 90's.  

My brother "borrowed" them some time back, so I have not even seen them in many years.  Him and I went shooting this weekend, and to my surprise I found both of my scopes mounted on two of his rifles.  

We did some shooting with them.  I had forgotten how narrow the eye relief was when using 20 and 25 power.  I am guessing that there was maybe an eighth of an inch of play or less in regards to the eye relief.  Quite frankly, I found the high powers to be unusable as I could not keep my head in the same spot long to see anything for any longer than a glimpse.

So, I started to wonder this... Have the scope companies made any dramatic breakthroughs in the last 15 years that broadens the eye relief at high powers to make them more user friendly?

No, what's changed is how people use scopes. That's been the biggest change, and in response to how people use scopes now, companies have redesigned the lens systems to accommodate. Over a longer period of time, today's scopes are much better than scopes from decades ago...even the crummy Chinese ones produce better images today than 40 years ago (except for the very expensive European scopes; they've always been pretty good.)



Specifically, the lens geometry is much more accepting of eye placement today than years before. The downside is that with today's scopes, shooters induce much more parallax error than the scope inherently has. With "yesterday's" scopes, inducing parallax error was pretty difficult as the geometry of the lens system forced you to place your eye in the center axis and only in the center axis of the scope. Hope this helps.