I regrett getting rid of all my thrifted Vortex due to a move. I had 2 of pretty much every one + 8 vigilons + 300 knock-off discs (from Amazon). It was a two-team war in a box 😢.
i had a vortex vigilon for all of one hour christmas morning until my cousin broke it by putting a disk in upsidedown and turbo jamming the entire mechanism
honestly it's weird Hasbro hasn't brought back Vortex considering weird gimmick blasters that look cool are one of the major things they excell at over more performance oriented brands a mag fed Diatron for example would be super cool
Unfortunately the community hasn't made very many vortex blasters either. The only ones I know of currently are project 12(pretty much a boom nitron), paragon(pretty much a vortex stryfe), and eclipse(boom nitron but a pistol). Eclipse is still in development. The paragon can take the pyragon drums, the creator of the eclipse is working on getting it to work with pyragon drums, and as far as I know project 12 cannot take pyragon drums but maybe it has been updated. At one point captain slug was working on a caliburn conversion but it seems like it was never finished.
I don’t necessarily agree with your rankings, as I haven’t played with all these blasters, but I will say the Nitron is my second favorite of the three Vortex blasters I own. My favorite is the Pyragon, just because it’s got such good ergonomics, and the front grip on the priming handle is just about perfect. My only minor gripe with it is that there’s a little slop in the front grip after priming, but it’s not too bad. The Nitron is fun, and I actually restored it from being completely nonfunctional due to a ton of battery leakage in the battery tray. I paid four bucks for it at Goodwill and sourced the original scope and a VTX Pyragon drum for it from eBay. I just wish it had a higher rate of fire, and the rev trigger tends to stick a bit and not engage the internal micro switch unless I press it just right. I don’t really want to mod it beyond increasing the strength of the mag catch spring, since I can’t solder and I really don’t want to ruin the blaster. The third one I own is the Vigilon, and it’s fun for what it is, I just like bigger blasters better, lol.
I have a Nitron that I lovingly restored from complete non-functionality, and I bought the VTX version of the Pyragon drum to go with it, along with the original Nitron scope. The drum does work, however the catch spring that holds the mag in place is a little too weak, so if you toss the blaster around even a little bit, it’ll fall out. I plan on putting a better spring in there after I get more discs so I can use it without worrying about that. Additionally, a funny thing I’ve noticed about Pyragon drums is that occasionally the disc doesn’t rise all the way to the end of the mag, so you have to give it a quick little spank on the bottom to get it to feed. Could be age, but I have both the original Pyragon drum and the VTX rerelease, and both of them do this. Still fun though!
If you like vortex just go to the goodwill outlets,it's not obscure its very readily available...we can 3d print everything...PRINT A NEW VORTEX BLASTER