Originally Posted by chaadster

I don’t disagree that costs are high, but I do think there’s a bit of hyperbole going on here. Inflation is a thing, and at ~3% year, over 15 years, that’s like 45%. I’m not sure of the rate exactly, but it’s around there. The top Specialized Tarmac was $10k in 2010 (using Wayback Machine) and is $15k today. That’s just about right on, and not an “order of magnitude more” nor out of sync with the decrease in the value of the dollar. Now, my income has not gone up 50% over the past 15 years, so yeah, the cost of a top tier bike is even more unreachable to me today than it was then, but this is a basic fault of our economic system, not something specific to bikes.

The other notion I’d challenge is the idea that innovate, UCI-illegal designs would cost more than conventional double diamond designs. Primarily that’s simply a cost of manufacturing question, and if the industry had shifted to another design, I don’t think there’s any reason to presume the industry wouldn’t achieve similar efficiencies to what we have today. Particularly, if you look at CF construction, and look at a bike like the Giant MCR (which I posted a pic of upthread), what you see is a much simplified, less complex design compared to a double-diamond frame. In such a case, it’s easy to imagine that construction would be simplified, too, if we’re using the hand-laid process for CF which was used in 1997 and remains in common use today. And that’s exclusive of more modern production techniques like mandrel winding or unknown methods which might have been adopted had the industry focused on those forms.

In the short term, price increases attend innovation, but in the long term, standardization decreases cost, so it’s hard to project out to a what-might-have-been scenario. One thing for sure is that the value of money is going to decrease over time, either in spite of or because of deflationary periods.