Love me some Zappa!

I think what's going on is the tube maker only wants to make steerers in like 4 or 5 cm increments to reduce the number of SKUs. With quality butted steerers, you have to be careful about shortening them, you might be cutting too much of the butt off. On the other hand, with cheap unbutted steerers where you just shove a plug of thicker pipe up in the bottom of the steerer, I can't think of any excuse for too many threads. You can just as easily make the steerer any length, so why not do it right?.

As a custom builder, I was somewhat fanatical about that, and strived to always have a bare minimum number of threads. Yay for me, I'm so special...
I know we can't expect quite that level of care on mass-produced forks. But even with the lowered expections we have for factory bikes, this current example is still pretty egregious.

Dave Tesch (RIP, great guy) used to have a threading machine that quickly and precisely put threads on finished forks, that he made all the same with extra-long steerers. (Before threadless headsets were invented.) This enabled him to make forks in large batches, and then assign them to frames later as necessary by chopping them to length and threading — just the right amount, natch. It was like a die, but segmented so the pieces came apart after the threads are formed, so it never has to back up. Davidson used to ship him a fork once in a while when we needed to have threads added, because adding threads with a normal die, even a good one (ours was Campy) is dangerous, sometimes it ruins the fork. I was jealous of his machine, but it was very large and expensive. I think he bought it used at an industrial auction; a bike frame building operation his size usually can't afford such a beast, not to buy new anyway. But you know who could afford it? Gitane!

Mark B