I don't get why droppers haven't completely dominated gravel yet, as it really opens up the design space to have a crisp handling bike that's safer to descend. I have a MTB friend who told me he'd rather give up his front brake before his dropper, and while that's obviously an exaggeration, he has a point. Just wanted to throw that out there since I hadn't seen it mentioned.
True, but I can still move my body back and down without a dropper for the occasional hard downhill turn on a gravel road. But I agree, there are times when I lower my CoG on gravel - just not enough to justify the weight, cost, complexity of a dropper in my case.
My gravel bike has 58mm of trail. I dont find it to be twitchy or sketchy. I dont think about the steering input when climbing or descending, its quite neutral to me, i guess.
True. People adapt to these minor geometry change in about 10 minutes - so its easy to "argue" the merits but does it really make that much difference?
Besides 58mm of trail isn't twitchy because bikes aren't twitchy, riders are. I can ride any of my bikes with "no hands." But if I stiff arm the bike, i'm riding twitchy. Twitchy is just an odd term that should be applied to riders, not to bikes.
Along with that -
A bike with slack head angel and more trail is going to have slower turn in. This can be good for a novice rider who needs to learn not to stiff arm things.
I find that gravel bikes with slack head head tubes be manhandled into a swift turn, and will overshoot the apex and the track out anyway. Not necessarily what someone with experience wants.