Originally Posted by
noimagination
And the original question never implied that there are not sufficient builders making custom steel. To me, though, many of the builders who are no longer making frames had a … cachet? … that most of the current builders don't. Could I, an enthusiast who rides a few thousand miles a year and who has never raced, tell the difference in a blindfold test between a Sachs and a ... (grabbing a name from someone's post) Landshark? Not a chance. Would I gain any benefit from choosing to spend extra (time and/or money) on a Spectrum vs. a Seven? Maybe not. But that’s not the question.
Most of this is simply nostalgia, I suppose, for a day when life was seemed simpler, bikes looked like bikes (and not rocket ships or praying mantids - NTTIAWWT, many do look pretty cool) and were made of steel. But I wonder if that is all it is?
Bingo. Your real question, I think, is not "why do people not lust after custom steel anymore?" but rather "why do people now not lust after the bikes I lusted after as a youth?". That cachet that you're referring to is in your head (definitionally, if there's not a concrete metric behind it).
As for "bikes looking like bikes", there were lots of crazy bikes made in the era of steel (there are threads about them here) and many more would have been made if the steel builders had had the freedom provided by carbon fiber.