Originally Posted by pinkrobe

Note: your conjecture is just that. Whether a fork is straight or curved has less to do with its compliance than the material it's made of. For example, a straight-blade Ti fork can be made more compliant than a curved-blade cromoly fork. Carbon fiber can be made [in the hands of somebody who knows what they're doing] to do damn near anything in terms of shape, rigidity and strength. It's relatively easy to create a fork that has both lateral rigidity and vertical compliance out of carbon fiber, and that's what many modern road forks are like. You can do the same thing with steel or Ti, less so with aluminum. By the same token, there are some carbon forks out there that are painfully non-compliant, sending a nice ping through the frame every time you roll over the slightest crack.