I don't know if this is as much wisdom as it is from having experience with Suntour when it was shiny new equipment on my bikes and because I still work on so many old bikes and can see how well these 80's Suntour parts hold up and how much better they work as compared to their Shimano counterparts.

They really did dominate the mid to upper end markets and it was because their parts were so well made.

There was a time many would have admitted that Suntour outperformed those Italians for a fraction of the cost and this has been cited as one of the reasons for their demise in that they never charged what the parts were really worth.

They could have put a lot more money into R&D and developed a successful indexed system before Shimano as they invented and held the patents on this technology.

I have a great fondness for the old Suntour as some of their parts were simply unmatched in quality... we can see the prices Superbe level parts bring these days as they really did live up to their name.