Some good points from Cactus this time. Stuff that hasn’t been directly said here. Along the lines of Rivendell’s philosophy, that I often agree with as well. It’s worth reiterating the whole stiffness-fetish argument:
Stiffness isn’t the only thing out there. People haven’t necessarily claimed that in this thread, but it’s implied a lot, especially in advertising. But often more stiffness ain’t necessary and doesn’t give any measurable actual performance gain (which may be the case with newer bottom bracket designs; I’d love to see double-blind tests trying to measure whether these actually do increase performance). Stiffness may be counterproductive in some cases; less stiff bars do soak up road buzz better. (Ideally, things would be engineered to flex a bit in the vertical plane, but not side-to-side or torsionally. But that’s another issue.)

I, too, hope that quill stems don’t become relics, although that does seem to be the trend.

Also, there’s no reason that a quill stem can’t have a separate faceplate clamp design, that doesn’t require unwrapping the bars to remove them and change stems.


On roccobike's post:
* we see a lot more cheap quill stems than cheap threadless stems, which is partially due to the newness off the technology, but does sort of deflate the point about threadless designs being cheaper.
* some good modern bikes are designed for/with quill stems. They just aren't any of the racing bikes. Which don't make much sense for most road cyclists to be riding anyway, unless one of their main goals is to race, or to ride fast and racing-like. Which I enjoy at times, but just cruising along through the country (still relatively fast) is much fun, too.