As someone that bought the second pair of STI shifters in northern California I've had just about everything.
I took out my C40 last Sunday and it was very nice having a nice Ergo lever under my hand. It made me feel so 2000-ish.
I never liked friction shifting because I can't hear the chain rub and someone has to come up beside me and tell me to trim it out. So indexed shifting is my preference.
I put my first cyclocross bike together about 5 years ago or more. I put on barend shifters on it and it was a nice shifting bike. Since then I built a lot more off road bikes (as opposed to mountain bikes mind you) and been liking barends a more every time I use them.
I've built 4 bikes up in the last 5 months (not counting another three or four for my brother and his wife) and put bar ends on all of them.
Barends definitely are not as convenient as Ergo. They don't give you that feeling that says "Cadillac" either.
But they are relatively cheap, reliable as heck and "good enough".
I wanted to have a Thoroughtly Modern bicycle and ended up with perhaps two of them that qualify as the sine qua non of bicycle - the Colnago C40 and the Eddy Merckx Ex Pro titanium bike.
I love these bikes and will never sell them. I may even be buried with them.... well, maybe that's unfair and I'll will them to some tall person.
But bicycling is about you and the bike and even a Motiv is a bike. I find that I prefer bikes as simple as I'm willing to put up with and cheap means simple. I don't like the idea of owning a bike with 47 parts in the brake/shift levers. And now that I've used the best I can truely say that good enough is plenty good enough.
Gimme barends from now on.
And as for MTB's - I've used all of that as well and I STILL prefer the old Suntour indexed thumbshifters.