I agree with most of the profound statements on LBS's inventory and what sells. You are all correct.
I am not shimano bashing...Dura-Ace is spectacular and made very well.....Guess I just want to see more flavors instead of ultegra w/ ultegra G and ultegra this and that. Anything less than ultegra is too vanilla.
All but one of my bikes (7 of em) have shimano and SRAM, mostly ultegra and dura-ace with a sram 3 speed i-motion. It works, its nice and I have never had a problem with it...except my sram 3 speed fell aprt once and sram was quik to fix it. Mainly because that was all that was offered. Asked about a campy switch over on my Tommaso from DA to Chorus and they had a caniption......."Why would you want campy"
My campy record is in a different realm of reality.