I started thinking about this as I brought my drop bar XC bike home from one of my LBSs after changing the rigid fork for a suspension fork and it hit me - I never expected this was going to be what I chose to be my “gravel bike”
When I first got interested in getting a gravel bike in ~2015, I was mainly looking for a bike that didn’t have flat handlebars (they weren’t comfortable for me), had big enough tires that could support my weight and still rolled well on road and was still capable off-road. I wanted a rigid frame because I thought I was too heavy to get any proper use of suspension, with geometry that was like an endurance road bike. But I wanted to run close to MTB sized tires, again for the volume to support my weight. But they needed to be designed for road/gravel, not for MTB trails.
So where am I at now? In terms of preferences I thought I would want a more racey gravel bike with monster tire clearance like the OPEN UP/3T Exploro. But I tried bikes similar to those and didn’t like the super twitchy feeling, and toe overlap was a thing I discovered lol. So having a bike with a longer front center, and even slightly longer chainstays (~435mm+) is now what I prefer. And drop bars got wider and I only want to pair a wider flared drop with a shorter stem, similar to modern MTBs but not as extreme. For reference these are the 52CM PNW Coast drop bars and I just bought the 48CM bars for my Toughroad which will be my road plus bike. I now feel like 46CM bars are too narrow for me.
There’s a bunch of other things like tubeless vs not, mechanical discs vs hydros (I use and like both), and wheel size 650b vs 700c (again I use both but in different ways that I thought I would use them). I’m also interested to see what you all think. Did your opinions on what you thought about gravel bikes, or what you wanted out of your gravel bikes change at all?