Brad, that should be the case, right? When I first started road biking, my friend who got me into it gave me the advice of staying mostly in the small chainring in order to spin and keep the RPMs up. I guess I'm too used to staying mostly on the small ring with my 9-speed CAAD4, where it's easy to stay in the middle of the cassette because I have more gears to choose from. Today's commute was mostly on the large chainring until the headwind got a little too strong, but even so I feel like I'd be staying more in the middle of the cassette if I had an 11T instead of a 10T. When you only have 7 speeds that one cog makes much more of a difference than on a 9-speed!

If it gives you any idea, for the past month without the FD I'd kept the chain on the small ring. About 85% of my riding was on the second smallest cog, and it would have been the smallest cog if the cross-chaining weren't so bad that it would rub on the large ring. Perhaps what I should have done instead was to keep the chain on the large ring and see how that felt, but I always feel like I'm dangerously close to mashing when I do that....

You're absolutely right in that I should ride awhile and evaluate. I'll commute for a few weeks, and if I still feel like I'm cross-chaining at the end of July, then I'll know that it makes sense to bump the cassette down one tooth.

EDIT: just realized that part of it probably has to do with the fact that my 9-speed is running a 42T small ring...