Originally Posted by Andy_K

See, that's how it starts. You get a beater bike for bad weather days (N=2). Then you decide to try using your cyclocross bike for cyclocross and realize that while it's OK you really would like to have a dedicated cyclocross bike (N=3). Then you enjoy cyclocross so much that you want to try short track mountain bike racing, but really a mountain bike works better for that (N=4). Meanwhile, you've been getting more into long weekend rides and you decide to get a dedicated road bike (N=5). By now you've realized that your beater bike was crap and sold it, bought a nicer "nice" commuter and decided to use it in all weather and designated your old "nice" commuter as a CX pit bike, but you'd still like to have a true beater for those times when you need to lock up downtown and don't want to risk losing one of your other bikes (N=6). After a while you come to understand that the qualities you want in a road bike for 100+ mile rides are different from the qualities you want in a bike for fast group rides (N=7). I'm not sure what happens after that because I'm still waiting for delivery of number 7.

But I ask you, could I really get one bike that would do all of that at any budget? I think not. It would be particularly difficult for one bike to serve as both CX bike and CX pit bike.

BTW, I have a family and will soon have seven bikes. Whether or not I'm reasonable may be debated. Not only do my bikes and our other family bikes combined take up less space than my wife's car, they also cost us less.