How many EL's are in service today throughout the birding and hunting communities? And how many failures of armor have resulted? My guess is an extremely small fraction.
When I Google "Swarovski EL armor", the only hits I can find dealing with complaints of bad armor take me to this thread on this forum. I honestly can't find any others. That strikes me as odd if this were a wide-spread issue as some are presenting it. You'd think armor failures would be reported somewhere else besides here??
The EL's have been the go-to, top of the line bino for Western hunters for many years now. Many outfitters use them daily to earn their income. I visit a couple large U.S. Western hunting forums and I can recall zero complaints of Swaro armor issues in all the years I've been on those sites. Zero.
That being said, I'm not ignoring the fact that some folks here have had issues. But those people seem to be in a very, very small minority. I understand it is an issue for them, but suggesting that Swaro is complicit in some sort of cover-up seems a bit silly. The fact that some people have repeated armor failures while most everyone else does not have any issue at all suggests to me those folks are doing something, or exposing their glass to something, that is leading to those repeated early failures.
Lucky for all involved, the company stands firmly behind their product and will fix any failures.