Originally Posted by
Stan Heinricher
The disappearance of traditional hometown bike shops makes me glad that I'm riding a 1978 steel road bike that's maintainable with simple tools I bought 40 years ago.
My suspicion is that a lot of the recent "innovation" is a bad bargain for anyone not pushing a competitive racing edge.
Eg, I see carbon anything as an anti-feature.
But there are select changes probably worthwhile, for example I could be wrong but I'd guess there are few socket head fasteners on that 1978 model. The normalization of their use is a big win - as is having them all metric.