"While I agree that there is a point of diminishing returns when worrying about the weight of a bike,and touring weight in general, I still think that it should be considered as its good to save weight where you can, and if you take pains to lighten your touring gear you should do the same with the bike. Obviously if you carry 50lbs plus of gear a couple of pounds more in bike weight won't make much difference, but if you go ultralight you can also lighten up the bike a bit and a few pounds will be a larger percentage of your overall weight.

For me the biggest weight saving area will be for me to reduce the size of my gut. I can easily take 20lbs off my touring weight by going on a diet."

That is certainly the flip side. I think all the talk about easily loosing body weight is probably not true for most people, that's pretty much what every study shows. I loose weight easily while touring, but not so easily any other time.

While there are often dozens of choices, most of us would choose probably fairly similar items if we had a free bike build offer. one might or might not get the Paul neo retros, how different in weight would those parts be from a NOS Shimano. On tour is just doesn't mater, because one doesn't get any points for edging out the competition by a nose. It does mater a lot to keep overall load down, and rotating weight. Rims matter, very little else does. Rims are a freebie, touring on Nos 20 mm Mavic rims is just as strong as rhinos and there is a big weight savings. They were designed to run anything from 23 MM to MTB tires. There really isn't anything else that saves like that, maybe kevlar bead tires, but I haven't tried them myself.