I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that every rider aspires to be on a road bike one day, and that hybrids are merely a stepping stone in that direction. A road bike and a hybrid are for different uses, and their entire biking culture is different in many respects. Hybrids do many things that road bikes don't do well, and road bikes do many things that hybrids don't do well. Different tools for different uses. Very much like how some hybrids are sometimes compared with 29er MTBs; they sometimes share some characteristics, but the differences are in the nuances, and they're both optimized for different purposes.

The hugely popular hybrid market exists expressly because many people don't want either extreme, but rather a "Goldilocks" or a "just right" somewhere in the middle.

In any case, both of the bikes mentioned in this thread are very much "road bikes", and the roadie forum might indeed be a better place to get good feedback about those two models in particular.