Steve,

All the questions you are posing are the ones that I, and I suspect many others, have wrestled with before making our various investments in quality eyepieces.

I think the only way you can answer them is to try these things out for yourself, in your scope, compare what you see with the alternatives and see what the differences, if there are any, are worth to you.

A couple of things I will say:

Regarding the number of lens elements, what you say is obviously correct and does apply to Tele Vue of course - and yet I've tried my Nagler T6's out "back to back" against good quality ortho's and I truly could not discern any loss of contrast, brightness, sharpness etc in the Naglers. Even when I was using a Powermate and a Nagler (9 lens elements !) the image was top quality - to my eyes.

The other thing I've found is with the Ethos (I own the 13mm) I can percieve the "at the limit" details that are harder to see with other eyepieces of that general focal length - eg: it always seems to be using the Ethos that I spot that faint Saturnian moon, the E and F componants of the Trapezium etc, first. I can then usually see these things with my other eyepieces but the Ethos seems to make them that little bit clearer, at least to me.

So, for me, they are worth the price but only you can decide if they do it for you.

John