I think it depends a little on what you are doing with the rifle.
If you are shooting F class competition at KD (Known Distance) ranges, I prefer to go with a non-distracting simple cross hair reticle, and have MOA target turrets on the scope (target turrets being larger, and marked in MOA on the shooter side, with the intent being that you can change them during the competition, as wind conditions warrant).
Adjustability range of the drop can be important. Most scopes can handle a 600 yd drop, but some run out of adjustability range to get to 1,000 yards. Two options are to cant the entire scope rail, which gets you on at 1,000, but you can't shoot 100 anymore. This is fine for a dedicated long range gun where you will never shoot 100 with it. The other option is to spend more money to make sure your scope has enough drop compensation. This may not apply to you. At 1,000 a .223 has a LOT of drop, the .308 might still hold enough at 1,000 to be good. I forget the come-ups, but 1,000 is likely in the 30 MOA range.
If you are in a tactical competition with unknown distances, you are more likely to sight in your scope once, and never touch the turrets, rather using the mil dots or other information in the reticle to judge holdoff and elevation. I think mil dots are specifically developed to range estimate a 6 foot target (ie a man), if you are not doing on-the-fly range estimation, and are not shooting 6 foot targets, you are giving up on alignment precision of fine cross hairs for no real benefit, other than being tacti-cool. Net, this is a bad move if you are shooting normal groundhogs, but a very good move if you live near a nuclear toxic waste dump, where the groundhogs are 6 feet tall.
Hunting is yet another set of needs, since you tend to zero your scope once, and will not try and adjust the knobs as the shot appears.
As to quality, I don't believe optics matter that much at the very high end of the spectrum. High dollar lenses are built to give minimum distortion or chromatic aberation across the entire range of the lens, so you don't get warps or rainbow fringes at the edge of the image. This is important for photography, where someone will look at the entire image, but both of these optical errors are cosine errors, where the degree of error is a function of the angle that the light is passing through the lens. For the image passing straight through the center (ie at the crosshairs), the angle is zero (or maybe a few MOA), so these errors are very small. I am not saying that I recommend a cheap knock-off lens, but within the spectrum of Leupold. NF, S&B, US Optics, etc, I just don't think there is a visible difference that justifies extra great glass versus very good glass.
Another requirement for hunting might be reticle illumination, as you could be out early or late. For competition and target work, you will never need this, it is just one more thing to go wrong, that you are paying for, and is extra weight.
Parralax correction, or objective focus is a nice feature to have if you get a big objective scope. This is a financial double whammy - big objectives gather more light, and will give a brighter image, but they cost more - 56mm lenses are more than 40mm lenses. As you go up in objective diameter, your optical f-ratio decreases, giving you less depth of field. Non- adjustable scopes have the distance focus fixed at one spot, and if your target is not at that spot, it is a little blurry. With a small objective, you get a pinhole effect, and the degree of blur on the target is very small. As objectives get bigger, that degree of blur gets bigger, and is no longer acceptable, so you have to build in an adjustment to tune the target focus.
Second plane focus (I think that's what they call it) is where you do zoom a certain way - basically comes down to if you zoom the image, does the reticle image zoom with it, or not. I forget the details, but basically, if you use mil dots to range a man-size target, the mil dots either only work at one specific magnification, or else the reticle needs to zoom with the image so the ratio of dot size/spacing to the image size remains constant. This adds a bunch of money, but unless you are a sniper, or competing at UD against silhouettes, you won't want this feature on your scope.
Just some thoughts. I think a Leupold is a fine choice. Not the best, but I think the value for the money is good. A lot of people buy way more scope than they will ever need, because they are either ignorant, or want to have the name brand, to show off.
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