Originally Posted by Campag4life

Point taken. First, 1 X 9...I run it on my 29er and 1 X 10 is 'nothing' new. If you spend time in the off road community you reference, this is a widely used practice. I enjoy my 1 X 9 bike. But with road cycling, if speed is the prize, there is a reason for 2 X 10. In fact, if living in the mountains with a lot of climbing, the average rider is well served with a 3 X 10 which mitigates the whole in gearing of a conventional 50/34 crank.

The essence of the OP's exercise can be reduced to the reason for 10 cogs in back, now becoming 11 which will likely become even 12 or 13 with next evolution to 135 axle spacing. So why do more cogs exist in back? For the simple reason of tight gear spacing. What the OP does is defeat this premise by reducing from 2 to 1 chainring in front. We as human's don't change our power output or cadence ability, but gearing changes the performance of the bike. By compromising the spectrum of gearing by limiting the no. of chainrings in front, the rear of the bike has to compensate for this compromise. A 11-36 rear cassette increases gear spacing pretty dramatically. Again, this completely flies in the face of why 9 speed, then 10s and now 11s cassettes came into being...for tighter gear spacing.

If you listened carefully to what the OP had to do to make this work..how sensitive set up is...and how cross-chaining creates greater friction and chain wear and noise, in combination with loss of tight gear spacing, it clearly states this is not an elegant solution if the priority is speed on a road bike. I believe 1 X 9 or 1 X 10 is fine for a knock around bike or a low maintainence bike for commuting etc provided the terrrain doesn't have too much climbing...but not for road or TT bike where speed is the priority. That is my counterpoint.