Almost all my bikes are mutts, so a group is more of a gathering. The setup I used for last year's Triple Crown was about my favorite for hills.


A converted FSA triple crank sporting a sugino 30 tooth inner, and a 46 tooth TA middle, with the outer ring removed.
On the rear was a 12-28 8 speed shimano XT cassette, with shifting chores handled by a 6500 ultegra short cage RD
Front D was an old campy victory model, did the job just swell
Pulling all that was 10 speed SRAM Rival shifters (with a hubbub mount on the RD)
It had a great gear range, with useful spreads between gears (suitable for a climbing bike, but not as good as modern 11 speed stuff on the flats).
No pics of it unfortunately.


This year I made the mistake of going with a full rival 10 speed group 52/39, 12-32. Works OK most of the time, but the Rival RD is not up to the level of the 6500 ultegra. Maybe it's 8 speed vs 10, but it seems to miss more shifts. Missing a shift with SRAM is twice the miss of missing one with Campy. With campy you miss an upshift and you try again. With SRAM you miss an upshift and you downshift instead, losing a fair bit of momentum before you correct (in hills anyway).

I find there is no perfect shifter in the modern world:
SRAM has the issue mentioned above, but works well when it works.
Veloce is not rebuildable and a bit notchy, but it has the virtue of downshifting one gear at a time.
Chorus and above campy levels dump 5 gears on the downshift if you want but often dump 2 when you only wanted one (especially in the drops).
Shimano's use of the brake lever for shifting chores is, er, not my cup of tea either.

My current favorite of the bunch is actually Veloce (over Chorus), or SRAM if it's playing nice.