Originally Posted by
niknak
I wouldn't wish bar end shifters on my worst enemy
I would never use brifters on a touring bike. If you gave me a free bike that came with brifters, I'd rip the brifters off and throw them in the trash.
It is personal preference.
I have bar end shifters (Shimano) on two derailleur touring bikes and a folding bike, I built up all three so I had the choice of what to use. Brifters on my road bike and a brifter for the rear on my rando bike, all Campy. I built up the rando bike, that was the brifter I chose for it. The road bike came with Campy, that was a selling point to me.
I am quite happy with those choices for those bikes and the purposes that those bikes serve.
Also have a Rohloff twist grip on the bar end on my heavy duty touring bike, but that is off topic.
I think a lot of individual preference is based on what you learned on and have used in the past. If I learned with brifters, I would probably refuse to use anything else.
I started using bar end shifters in the pre-index shifting era (1980s) on a five speed freewheel. I had a choice, I could use downtube shifters (taking one hand off the bar to shift) or keep that hand on the bar to use for steering while I shifted. Hitting bumps in the road with only one hand on the bar was problematic on cracked and beat up pavement. Thus, bar ends had a huge advantage. A second advantage was that it was easy to shift both front and rear simultaneously. I think that bar ends were choice for touring decades ago for that reason. And they stayed a touring choice from the manufacturers simply because of past usage for that purpose.
The newer brifters are proving to be fairly robust and reliable. And I have met a lot of people that preferred them for touring.
That said, a friend of mine was getting ready for his third cross country ride, Northern Tier with ACA. And suddenly his rear brifter stopped working several weeks before the start of the ride. It was a decade old Shimano 9 speed brifter, thus an earlier model. And he could not find a replacement and he was in a hurry to prep his bike for his tour. He asked me about bar ends, I let him use one of my touring bikes for a test ride, he then had bar ends installed on his touring bike. When he was on that tour, the rear brifter stopped working for another tour participant. A couple bike shops got it to briefly work for a bit, but she ended up finishing Norther Tier with a three speed as all she could shift with was her front shifter on her triple. If I was along, I would have tried to switch her bike to downtube friction as a worst case scenario instead of completely losing rear shifting.