I find it intriguing that VO went to the trouble to make a thick and rigid chainring that includes pins (and ramps??) to aid shifting. I'm sure that TA knows how to do this, but apparently hasn't felt the need to do it for their 50.4 BCD rings (or at least didn't do it for mine).
As an engineer, I find myself wondering about the tooling cost for the unique chainring, the volume of sales, and how many they have to sell to break even on it.
Of course, that's also an analysis that had to be done for the SunXCD crank arms, etc. It would be interesting to know how many have been sold. The same applies to the new Rene Herse cranks that Jan Heine sells... is there a market for 1000 cranks? 10,000 cranks?

Steve in Peoria (glad that I don't have to worry about this stuff)