Originally Posted by
zacster
10 speed (and other) cassettes have much better shifting performance than the old freewheels ever did due to the ramps and profiles on the teeth and better chains. Just a touch of the shifter puts me in the next gear either way, and I can always multi shift too with a swing of the lever.
Yes, that's a good point. With the advent of Hyperglide, really, in the mid-80s or somewhere around there, shifting really made a huge jump in performance. Indexing further refined it, but the gains were really more oriented toward sport riding and racing, so while still performance gains, they weren't as valuable to the recreational cyclist, perhaps, as Hyperglide was.