Originally Posted by Banzai

Ever since SRAM overcame their inability to perfect front shifting by giving us the "1x" drivetrain, I've seen a proliferation of ridiculous cassettes out there. Things with large cogs that look like chainrings themselves.

The gaps between gears must be just cadence-shatteringly and knee-wrenchingly huge. At least as bad as my Alfine 8, which has its place for certain conditions, but the gaps alone prevent me from ever trying to employ it in the name of efficiency and speed.

Maybe I'm just old and old fashioned now, but it seems like there's been a big shift in the notion of proper, or even "ideal" cassette spacing. I've long felt that a bike with sub-10% gaps in back just smoothed everything out, and kept me efficient on the ride, to the point where I once put a triple on a bike just so I could really tighten up the cassette, and not to deal with hills, but with howling winds.

What do the BF masses now consider acceptable for gaps in this new drivetrain age? And yes, I realize that rider preference and riding conditions are widely varied, but we have a forum just to field these kinds of obscure discussions.