When I recently bought my LHT complete I also planned to switch out the barcons for brifters (which is what I'm used to), but after using the default LHT barcons for 400mi so far, I've really come to like them and have decided to keep them after all. They're really smooth and not any more difficult to use than brifters once I adjusted to the bar end location, I see no point now in spending more money on more complicated shifters, I can always do so at some point in the future if some compelling reason comes up (the LHT owners google group has lots of info on that swap if you need), but so far these are great and I plan to keep them...