Or just day to day life. I'm running mechanical in the winters for the convenience.
And you know, the point I was trying to make was that there are other people as well who want to do MTB touring or live in colder regions. And as we know, surly makes these do all- kinds bikes, rugged, durable, easy maintenance. it makes sense not to equip them with something which is PITA to fix and hard to get spares for.

I mean yeah, you could tour with an enduro bike with a wheelset built with proprietary spokes, hyrdro brakes and electronic shifting. It is totally possible. It's just idiotic to do that. It's not even about how often stuff breaks. It's about what are you going to do, if something does break.
Of course you can't prevent everything and catastrophic stuff can happen. However it's still more common to break a brake line in a fall, snap a chain or break a spoke (hint, all of these are kinda weak parts) than for example snap the frame in half. And even that can be fixed if it's steel or in rare cases, aluminum. Carbon as well but that really requires some specialization. I think we have one shop doing carbon repairs in finland and their wait times are like months.