Originally Posted by
kingston
I used the term marketing company because it's the marketing company who decides how to spec the bikes they market. The whole point of marketing is to get people to buy more stuff and spend more money than they otherwise would, so scam/not-a-scam not something I've ever brought up or care about, I'm just disappointed with how the market has eliminated options in the entry-mid-level market segment.
I might agree with you at the very lowest level. A bit like those really crappy full suspension mtbs you see in the box stores. That's pure marketing bs for sure.
But once you get into decent hydraulic disc brakes like you would find on a mid-level bike with say Shimano 105, it's far more engineering led. Shimano, SRAM, Campag have all come to the same conclusion about the way forward with braking on road bikes. Bike designers and consumers have already made their preference pretty clear. Marketing just follows along naturally. Marketing didn't invent disc brakes, engineers did. Consumers at the higher end of the market are not stupid. You can market complete crap to the bottom end of the market for sure, but not much above.
I don't know what bikes you intend to buy in the future, but anything half decent is going to feature hydraulic disc brakes from this point forward. If entry level bikes feature crappy mechanical disc brakes just to look the part, then maybe that is a problem if you are in that specific market. But I don't remember rim brakes being good at that level either.
On a cost basis there isn't actually that much in it now. A quick look at prices here in the UK shows a Shimano 105 rim brake caliper costs more or less the same as an hydraulic caliper. Okay so you have to buy rotors too, but on a mid-level bike costing say $2000 it's hardly a big deal. Looking at the whole 105 groupset cost, it's about £150 difference, although you can get deals on the rim brake groupset for obvious reasons!