I've been sawing the bottoms off coke bottles for most of my life. You should talk to your eye doctor and if he is comfortable with the idea, take a revolver or two into his office to get the proper prescription for shooting glasses.

Well, in my opinion your gunsmith was right, but maybe he overdid it a bit for your use. I am in approximately the same state as you, with a minor difference or two, and some experience. Let me tell you what I do, even though not all of it will be exactly right for you.

First off, if you can focus on the front sight with your reading glasses, fine, but you say you then can't see very far away. This problem is a little less for me for three reasons.

1: Because I'm a pistol shooter, my prescription in the lower part is set for about front sight distance (about a yard). Actually, a little closer, because my optometrist and I had a big argument about it, and compromised a little. I think I ended up agreeing to +1.25 in the lower segment (+1 would be right for 39 inches). This has worked out well for shooting and for computer use (my recent occupation). If you have reading glasses of +1.50 or +2.00, you may still see the front sight well, but your distant vision will be worse.

2: I recognise that bright light will help me see sights and target together better.

3: Contrary to all advice, I have experimented with focussing on the bullseye rather than the sights, although I still put almost all of my effort into keeping the sights aligned, and make placement on the target secondary, as usual. By careful experimentation and record-keeping, I have found that target focus usually produces better results for me indoors or in bad light, that is, whenever sight focus produces a really bad target. Focussing on the target (through the top part of my specs) never messes up my sights quite that bad.

I have not played around with the handgun sights themselves - they seem to be OK (mostly S&W revolvers with .125" sights, also some 1911's with Mepro's). However, I have found that my Browning .22 Autoloader and my Ruger 10/22 with peep and Firefly front are going to require out-and-out shooting glasses, corrected for the actual front sight distance and placed where they will be used when the rifle is brought to cheek. Meanwhile, my FN and my Galil, both with peeps and bolder military posts are satisfactory, although the shooting glasses would be an improvement. This is how I know your gunsmith was right, even though he may have overdone it for your specific application.

If you have 20/20 vision and you are just going to use reading glasses, the best prescription in diopters for a front sight at x inches is 39"/x. Example: If your front sight is 26" from your eye, 1.50 is the best strength for seeing the front sight. However, if you can see it well enough with 1.25 or 1.00, that would be better, because it wouldn't mess up your distant vision as much. You can usually get these things in the five-and-dime with only the bottom half corrected, which is probably exactly what you want, at least for pistols. You should test these in fairly poor light - when the light is bright, everything is less critical and works fairly well even if things are not quite right.

Hope this is some help.

I hear ya. I put a scope on my 454 and can shoot much better with it now.
I've been thinking about a small red dot but don't think that it will have the precision. I've also been thinking about the peep sight. Maybe it would be easier to just focus on the front sight and target through the peep? I don't remember where, but someone makes replacement blades with the peep??