[footfootfoot]

What about how huge the bikes are? My MTN bike frame is a 19 or 20 inch compared to my road frame which is a 24. It is sparrow-like compared to the newer bikes and I felt it was pretty tight on the course I rode the other day. I can't imagine being on one of those behemoths.

The handle bars were at least 8" wider. Also, what's up with the tubes? Do the big rectangular tubes make the bike frame lighter? I note that the manufacturers don't mention weight on their websites, they instead make some specious claim like, "Weights can vary depending on how the bike is set up..."

Yeah, OK but why not just list weights for frame sets by size? Like they used to? Whenever I see shit like that it makes me think they are being intentionally vague in order to hide the truth. If the information was a selling point it would be on their splash page.

Are these big tubes lighter?

Another thing the sales guy told me was that higher end bikes tended to have single chain rings in front and multies in back. Great for climbing (reduction gears) but I'm guessing coasting downhill and or very little movement on the flats- so essentially a specialty bike instead of a bike that could do OK on pavement.

So the trillion gear freewheels seem to be big, but after 6 gears does one need to cut the ratios that finely? It's not like humans are optimized for an extremely narrow range of RPM that we need so much gearing to compensate, or are we? Usually, it was a question of speeding down as fast as possible and then downshifting to the correct gear to power up the other side. I've only had one derailleur in my life that could reliably downshift under power and that was a Huret Duopar Titane. A sad day when that died.

Are new derailleurs better? Can you shift under power?