I'm not sure I follow you Dave. The "Death Fork" was certainly a problem for Lambert and then Yamaha but Lambert/Viscount never had a very large market share, certainly not large enough to affect the entire industry. FWIW Viscount owners I knew loved them.

In my observation there was a change in consumer interest (for many "10 speeds" were a fad) and the huge growth of mountain bikes, even in my mountain free FLA, that did in the road bike boom.

If dep't store 10 speeds, that were both failure prone and incapable of functioning properly even when brand new, could sell in huge numbers throughout the boom I don't see the trouble with a very small % of higher line imports causing a huge problem.