Interesting, well I have been cycling more or less daily for over 15 years but as a method of getting from A to B rather than an activity in its own right. This is the first time I have bought an expensive bike, all my previous ones would have had a standard 5 cog casette and 3 cog crankset although I have no idea of the number of teeth. My experience though is that I would basically end up 99% of the time using only 2 gear combinations. When I have to stop at lights I would drop the crankset to the middle cog and the casette to the biggest cog. I'd leave it like this for a few seconds when pulling away from the lights and then slam it straight back to the max gear ratio as I pick up speed. I would find then that my speed would max out and I would feel no 'resistance' from the pedals any more. Now I suppose if I were to dramatically increase the RPMs of the pedals I would start to feel resistance and speed would increase further but intuitively it seems like the amount of extra effort I would have to put in would be huge to get just a small increase in speed. It seems to me (although maybe I'm wrong) that I would top out at a higher speed for the same max RPMs if I had a higher max gear ratio. I did have an odometer on one of my bikes so in absolute terms: on my commute to work the max speed I would hit would was 28mph (on a downhill portion of the journey). The smallest cog on the crankset was basically unused except on the rare occasions when I would take it up into the hills and then I could meet uphill gradients in excess of 45 degrees which were a struggle even using the lowest combination available.