The daVinci provides some interesting starting possibilities. I don't know the orientation of my wife's pedals when she starts, but she's capable of getting us going on pretty steep pitches. I start with my pedal at about 10am to give me a few more milliseconds to get into the saddle. Once we're going my wife can quickly sync up.

My new FD setup on our quad chain rings is working very well. Still, I wouldn't be able to downshift under load, but we can generally grunt it out and back off to enable a down shift. My preference is always to grab the granny (can I say that on BF?) and upshift 2-4 gears in the front before things get hard. That's one thing I really appreciate about the Campy shifters: the ability to quick upshift or downshift 3 cogs at a time.