I'm struggling with this lens since quite a bit, and I'm not able to understand if the lens have problems or I'm expecting too much.
Surely it has a problem: it's never consistent. I've got shots that are sharp as a knife, and many (too much, for my tastes) that are really missing detail, up to few shots where it looks like they have been painted with a big brush. But what I'm really trying to understand now is if the extreme softness is something to expect in certain situations, or this is a defective lens:
100% crop. ISO 200, F4.5, 1/2000, RAW, sharpened a bit in post
It's a crop, the area is from bottom left corner of the image. 3/4 of the height, 3/4 of the width (just to make it stay under 2mb limit without lowering jpg quality under 95%)
Camera has focus point set in the middle, that in the full image is on the far mountain, a bit above the point where the farther and the nearer mountain begin to overlap