My view of Schwinn was that sometime in the later half of the seventies, they started selling bikes that were on par with many other full-line bicycle brands, like Fuji, Nishiki, Bridgestone... etc. Many bike brands were using the same factories in Japan for their frames, and switching to the same Japanese components (either Suntour or Shimano). From that point going forward, through the eighties and the first half of the nineties, Schwinn was like everyone else... selling a better product each year, in a range of price points, in an effort to keep up with the stiff competition in the marketplace at the time. Lot's of C&V enthusiasts have since ran across their output in these decades and have come to notice, and respect, the bikes that Schwinn sold. Maybe the colors, or the graphics, weren't the latest-and-greatest at the time, but now in retrospect, those things aren't really the deal breakers they may have been when finding a comparable bike was as easy as a drive to the next bike shop.