Originally Posted by
redlude97
I guess I don't see the gravel market as being something that caters towards racers or that persona
Perhaps not, but the "gravel" equipment is still making only incremental changes from current road arrangements. 50-34 to 46-30 is 1-2 shifts out back.
They have the cassettes already, if they thought there was a huge market and people would be happier with 46-30 11-42 they could have put that out instead
A lot of people don't need anywhere close to a 115" top gear even for paved riding, and could be more comfortable on tighter spacing than an 11-40 offers. What I'd like to see is more practical crank options that support tiny chainrings (smaller than 46-30) and a road q-factor.
I'm not saying that there
is a market. I'm saying that there probably
should be, and that it's frustrating that the big brands have been so hesitant to even test the waters. Pretty much every mainstream attempt to reduce standard chainring road chainring sizes over the last half-century has succeeded, but it's been baby steps the whole way. That's silly, like watching a programmer script a linear search when a binary search would be far more appropriate.