I'm aware of that as your view, experience. Mine has been the opposite in that all of the MRDS I've broken time & again were direct mounts. Glocks with the Unity Atom system and a round count on a par with my RMR'd M&P has had no failure, while another with a DPP can't be counted yet. A good friend with a direct mounted Aimpoint on a Glock had significant issues at the 1500-2000 mark (i can't recall his exact count). Additionally, as there are not readily available factory spare or any after-market slides for the M&P - which there are for the Glock - I'm not inclined to keep cutting up slides. Admittedly that is just my take on it.
I broke eight DP Pro optics between September 2017 and May 2018 on Glock MOS and Walther Q5 multi optics systems. Between May 2018 and now, I have not broken a single Pro on over a half dozen direct mounted installations with similar or higher round counts. I again started shooting a Pro on a 19 MOS upper in early October 2018, and broke it by this weekend. While that may not be science, and relevant to all optics, in that it covers at least a dozen Pro units and tens of thousands of rounds, it is highly suggestive to me as regards the DP Pro.
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
Soooo back to the AOS...
OK, someone here needs to take the plunge with Agency, and get us some data.
Here is a direct mount issue. Today, out of curiosity, I popped a recent manufacture DP Pro off a direct milled Glock slide, to see how another Pro would fit. Neither of the two loose Pros I had handy would fit. Probably they could be made to fit with some gunsmithing, but this is obviously not desirable. When I break my Pro, which seems inevitable, do I ask Leupold to replace the guts and use the original housing so it still fits?
Not sure if I mentioned it, but I understand Glock has forty RMS Shield optics in use with their sales demo guns, and not one has broken so far.
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
That is interesting information. Did Shield do some upgrades to that model? I didn't think it was getting a lot of love after it was introduced. But I seem to recall that there might be some sort of Gen 2 changes coming.