Well, no one said America was terrible.. only that Europe seems to embrace new technological ideas more actively at the moment. It's not a judgement. Part of it is probably that there is a huge population there of mixed cultures co mingling in a small geographic area so there are just a lot of new ideas being developed and part is a forward looking direction for solutions wherein the US seems to currently be looking back to the past in a nostalgic sense for solutions.

Sometimes designs come about for functional reasons and sometimes they don't. The well established functional design for a utility bike was the "Northwood" like bars similar to the ones in Irwin's picture. Almost all post war bikes had them. With affluence people could afford bicycles for recreation and racing and the drop bar road bike became vogue. With the bike boom people rejected the utility design as old fashioned and embraced the road design as being sporty. Now, even though in many ways the loaded touring bike is a utility design the stigma attached to utility bars remains. I just think European thinking is better at tweezing out the particular activity being asked of the bike and designing well made specific solutions. Here we seem to want to make one design fit all by bending and hammering it into a slightly different shape.

A truly innovative drop bar design would incorporate built in aero bars for example. So many people want them but still have to resort to after market patches to an old design that refuses to acknowledge that. Why? Partly it's inertia and partly there is no economic incentive.