I mean, I'm still feelin' the sentiment here, but what is it you want to see the industry do? We have 2 manufacturers making reasonably affordable and very, very nice 7 speed internal hubs. They're not on the 'mart bikes yet, but this will probably happen eventually. Sears and others made no-name copies of the 3 speed SA hubs in the 60's, though the original version was already wildly popular when they started copying it. But with walmart selling drop bar road bikes now, I think we've proven that anything that is popular at the LBS will eventually show up at the discount store. It's just a question of the technology trickling down, patents expiring, etc...

I'm not too optimistic about the european utility bikes ever being very popular in the US. Even if we all started riding bikes exclusively tomorrow, our cities are still laid out for cars, which means you do have to be able to cover some distance in a reasonable time. Every time I look at one of those Euro-tanks, I think, "man, I would only want that for like 1 out of every 10 trips I make, and if I'm going to have a separate piece of hardware for those trips, I'd rather it just be a trailer." Hence my trailer rant above.