Originally Posted by
Maelochs
Whatever works ... but the reason people developed brifters, and that brifters because the industry standard, is that they are worlds better than all the other shifting options.
Please consider visiting YouTube and the Park Tools website. You can learn a huge amount about how to make your bike work properly, and i can tell you even a thumb-fingered idiot can do it ... I speak form personal experience.
Seriously, given how you "fixed" your brifter, what would you do if you got a flat?
(BTW, if you have a triple front brifter you can use it fine to shift a double ... I do it on my Raleigh. Just adjust the limiting screws .... oh, never mind.)
Actually I could have made it work if the brifter was not broken. And it was not a triple, so it never would have worked with a triple. And I've probably forgotten more about fixing friction-shifting drivetrains than most folks know. The limiting screws were most assuredly not the problem. The cable pull mechanism of the brifter itself was the problem. I could manually get the derailleur to cover the span, but the brifter itself would not pull sufficient cable.
The fact is, brifters are a superior mechanism for shifting the rear cluster. But they are NOT superior for shifting the front - especially with triples, which is why Shimano has basically stopped supporting front triples for road bikes.
And I've probably fixed more than a hundred flats in my 30+ years of cycling.
In any case, the configuration I went with is the one Lance Armstrong won multiple Tour de Frances on, prior to being stripped a decade later for doping.
My apologies for not being the thumb-fingered idiot that you see yourself as, but if you had the mechanical aptitude, you'd realize that this is a superior configuration, because it works, and it's simple. That's why Lance preferred it to what the manufacturers want the general public to buy.