Originally Posted by ThermionicScott

From what I've gathered through brief experience and some amount of reading and tinkering on HTML5 Gear Calculator, joy or misery with a compact double is hugely dependant on the cassette you use. The wrong cassette will have you cross-chaining all the time, but with the right one, you can use that 50T for the bulk of your riding, only shifting to the 34T for steep and/or prolonged climbs. For example, I would be pretty miserable with a compact and 11-21T cassette, because my preferred flatland gear of 72" is near the extreme in both rings, and there are 2-3 gears on the top that would never get used by me. By comparison, a 12-25T or 13-26T would be much nicer.