Originally Posted by challaday

Anyway, a lot (if not most) of this is marketing hype designed to sell products to people who don't necessarily understand the subtleties of geometry, weight distribution, or for that matter anatomy in the choice of a bike. They can understand weight because its a very obvious metric. Bike A weighs a pound less than Bike B so Bike A must be better.

It works the same way in so many other consumer marketing fields, like digital cameras where more megapixels are supposed to be the be-all and end-all, or stereo equipment where more wattage is always better, or cars where more horsepower is definitely a must, or computer CPUs where more Mhz are always faster, and on and on.