Bruce,
In my experience, problems with eyepieces are very rare. In fact, I'll go as far as saying that among the top brands and models, I have not yet encountered an eyepiece that I would call a lemon, i.e. one that would severely compromise the image quality of a scope if compared with another specimen like it.
Now, I don't remember if the Zeiss eyepiece can be mounted in any other rotational orientation except for the one indicated by the dot, but in general a good way to determine whether aberrations are introduced by the eyepiece or the scope is to rotate the eyepiece relative to the scope body and to investigate whether aberrant patterns rotate with the eyepiece. This works for astigmatism and eccentric ring patterns indicative of miscollimation.
It'll be interesting to hear how your star-test goes. People use language differently, but in my vocabulary, "awful" is not a word suitable for describing the image of a good sample of the Zeiss at 60x. A lemon, on the other hand, will look awfull at high magnifications.
Kimmo