I think a few of us were waiting to see what Oculus would do @Freak, in that if to jump from the Rift to a full Rift 2 with things like varifocal displays and eye tracking for foveated rendering to reduce the hardware requirements for much higher resolution panels (or panels with mixed resolutions with higher PPI in the center etc) and the like would happen in the next year or not. Obviously it looks like it is going to be longer out now, i.e. 2021, 2022 etc.
After the recent OC5 dev conference and the messages given out there was why the SO was worth another look as an interim upgrade to existing Rift owners. The SO+ timing and the claims of more readable text etc with the anti-SDE was just sort of coincidence of timing.
The SO was always better than the Rift for sim stuff I feel, it just came out when a lot of us already had a Rift already, and that’s a harder upgrade to justify compared to just having no VR.