My LE is going back.

Le LE seems pretty soft compared to the first on, when enlarged.

Have you tried shooting on a tripod to take the hand holding element out of the equation.

Looks like a defective camera more than a badly designed lens.

the sharper one clearly has sharpening applied looking at high magnifacation.

You should be comparing raw files, not sooc jpegs where the internal processing from raw to jpeg could be different.

Also, the blur in the slower shutter speed photo seems to be more due to camera shake than anything else.

SOOC does not necessarily mean the same conversion processing, though.

You could try again, shooting the exact same thing in raw and manual mode so every exposure parameter is the same, and then compare with a converter that can ignore the camera model's default processing. FastRawViewer and RawDigger both do minimal interpretations of raw data and just do color conversions and standard tone curves, with no camera-specific sharpening or NR.

one clearly has more sharpening applied

Using a tripod is just plain common sense I would have thought.

I can see aliasing in the bottom (LE) version at 100% pixel view, despite it looking softer, so my conclusion is a difference in Fuji's version of what Canonites call "Picture Styles". If you use USM on the LE version, with a radius of 0.3px, as you increase the strength, details sharpen readily and rapidly before any haloing or exacerbated noise occurs, which makes me lean towards the theory that there may be nothing specifically wrong with the lens, but the "Picture Style" is set to "not sharp".

You really should try a neutral converter with raw capture, IMO. If they are the same, then all that the LE may need is for an edited or different "Picture Style".

if your worried about the sharpness you should have kept the 26meg camera. from all the reviews ive seen the new camera images are inherantly soft.

looking at these heavey crops incamera raw processing has slightly changed.

I forgot about the slowness of raw decoding software with new cameras. and X-Trans is not going to make it any faster!