Originally Posted by
Dreww10
Seriously?
No one on this forum, no one on your local club ride, or anywhere was asking for disc brake road bikes in any great number. They were all still in search of ever-lighter road bikes, light frames, light components, faster wheels, and so on. I can't remember a single post here begging and pleading for disc brake road bikes. The industry saw dollar signs at the idea of forcing every road cyclist on the planet to buy a new bike (and, at the same time, lowering its production costs by making road, gravel and CX parts all standardized), and it aggressively went after that initiative by either making its entire lineup disc, or its most desirable bikes disc-only, and then marketing the daylights out of it so people had no other choice but buy disc.
I'm not saying disc brakes aren't better, or that they aren't advantageous for some riders' environments, but this shift was engineered by a financially sagging cycling industry that needed to boost sales and lower costs, not by public demand.
Yes, seriously. Vocal minority on forums professing their love for steel frames, mechanical groupsets, rim brakes and other sorts of retro stuff isn't representative of what people are actually buying 😉
Of course nobody was asking for disc brakes before they existed, but now they are out there and work well, every single rider I rode with who tried disc brakes said he wasn't going to buy a rim brake bike ever. Several riders from my triathlon club said they wish they had discs after rainy races on CF wheels and said their next bike would have discs. New roadies I know who came from MTB or other bikes where discs are standard fare just didn't even consider rim brakes as an option.
There's no conspiracy. The bike industry made a better product and people are overwhelmingly buying it. They wouldn't have discounted rim brake models if they sold as well. They didn't, however.