Originally Posted by kingston

You might be right, but that period was pretty brief. I bought a bike with road BB7's in 2012, which was fairly early on for road disks. Nearly all road bikes had rim brakes at that time. Pretty sure hydraulic road disks were a year or two later. I didn't love the mechanical disks, and thought the hydraulic levers were hideous looking, so the next couple of bikes I built for myself had rim brakes. In 2017 I was shopping for an entry level road bike for my wife, and everything at the 105 level was mechanical disk. She would have preferred rim brakes for the type of riding she does, but it was simply not available as a complete bike. We would have had to either build a bike or gone down to super low entry-level. It seemed more like marketing than consumer demand to me, but I'm not in the bike business so I don't really know. Probably some combination of both which is how fashion works.