Ouch! That hurt! You wouldn't really do that would you? Of course, thats the way I felt 28ys ago when I was looking at a state of the art ,20 yr old racing frame from some Italian factory where some guy took a hammer and pounded the lugs into shape around the tubes while the whole thing was cherry hot and comparing it to my state of the art Tim Isaac work of "art".

But to me, the old italian frame provoked no emotive attachment because I hadn't experienced my first ride on silks on a frame like that; I hadn't had a peak experience cresting a hill on an endorphin high, and witnessed the rising sun over a fall valley on a frame like that; I hadn't had the biggest competitive win of my life in the local criterium on a frame like that. All those things make a person -feel- like everything about that bike, the ride, the form , the function is in fact the peak of expression in bicycle form and function. Everything else before and after is abherrant.

While acknowledging the advances in technology and the benefits that some of the bicycles today have, I still feel, for what are to me objective reasons, that the bicycle that Indurain rode on, the bicycles from the time of the step in pedal to the advent of the indexing systems, were the peak of minimalist expression in the development of the bicycle. But then, that's just me.

The point here being that this is an almost impossible argument to discuss objectively. As a result, the only answer as to what is right is what evers right for you.