For the last decade my primary lens has been the ancient Nikon 28-70 2.8. It's a sharp workhorse. But for a lens that I could take on walks it didn't go wide to 24mm nor long enough say to 100mm or 135mm. So, I bit the bullet and bought a 24-120 f4 VR. I was worried that it wouldn't be sharp enough for "pro" work. This image from last weekend is about 1/10th of the whole frame and it's really sharp.
Not every lens in a production run performs the way you would like it to. Some units can have less than perfect sharpness to the point, where I've seen photographers purchase a pro lens and return it for another and then another until they have the performance they need. In this case, I got lucky!