During my many years conducting Nature and Scientific photography, I have had the opportunity to use a veritable arsenal of 35 mm and large-format lenses. Many of these I do own personally, a current total of some 100 lenses. Not all lenses are created equal, that's for sure.
Price is a putative indication of optical quality, but can equally well be misleading.
People have repeatedly asked me to provide an overview of these and other lenses to show their image-producing potential. True, a number of excellent resources for evaluating lenses are found on the Net. Many are based upon subjective evaluation of the items in question, but only a few sites can provide a truly encompassing overview based on a single person's experience. On the other hand, sites exist that overwhelm you with MTF plots purportedly providing indisputable facts. However, such statistics basically are as helpful as knowing the mass of a lens - MFT testing, notwithstanding its genuine scientific foundation, cannot predict the pictorial outcome of any lens.