Originally Posted by Gresp15C

Too early to tell. We are clearly beyond the "early adopter" stage but not very far into the "mature" stage, by which I mean that they cover the price range from top to bottom. I'd like to see how they behave when they've been neglected, abused, left out all winter, and so forth. I'd like to see what questions beginners ask about maintaining them on BF -- what kinds of problems actually emerge, and how do people cope with them? What's it look like to replace a damaged disc brake on a 20 year old bike?

It's not a slam dunk, but by those criteria rim brakes aren't much to write home about either. There is a huge variation in quality. High quality, dual pivot calipers are snappy, cheap vee brakes with hardened pads are crappy. What are crappy disc brakes like? Brake noise seems like a coin toss. The disc brakes my Diamondback are excellent, on my wife's Surly, horrible.

I'm not a competitive or fast cyclist, just an old pokey commuter and casual rider. I have a lot of friends in more or less the same boat. Virtually all of them, when they've tried a bike with disc brakes, think the difference is night and day. One friend thinks I have a death wish because one of my bikes has rim brakes. But they're comparing new disc brakes on decent quality bikes to the crappy vee brakes with hardened pads and gummed up cables on their old bikes. When they have tried my dual pivots, they agree that they're pretty snappy. But dual pivots don't accommodate big tires. When I point out that disc brakes have slightly better performance in wet weather, they point out that they won't ever ride in wet weather.