Originally Posted by
Russ Roth
Shimano used to be good with interchangeability but they've kind of screwed that one in the last few years. My first flat bar build for my wife I used LX shifters with an XTR rear derailleur and an Ultegra front derailleur on a road crank. But with 9v, Shimano switched up the front shifting. The cranks still have the same spacing between the rings but the derailleurs are designed to only work with their respective shifters i.e., road vs. mountain. They put an extra long shift in the bottom to middle ring in the MTB shifters and changed the derailleur to match. Then they tried switching up road cassettes with 10v DA and Ultegra, that flopped but with 10v and 11v they started changing rear derailleur ratios even though, again, the cassette spacing didn't change. So I can run a road shifter and der over my 11sp cassette or a MTB shifter and derailleur over the exact same cassette but not the road shifter with MTB derailleur. Worse, the new road 10, 11, and 12v road run different pull ratios from the previous 10v in both road and MTB; really messing with parts compatibility. It's reduced a lot of my appreciation for Shimano. Campy isn't really any better but they never were, they always had higher level stuff work differently so you know you had higher level stuff.
Dude, it's really not that bad. Everything up to 10 speed was fine. That's 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Shifting on 10 speed was and is very, VERY finicky. You need just about all the tricks in the book to get it working nicely. Shimano realised this for 10v mountain and debuted Dyna-Sys. They left road alone to keep backwards-compatibility. 11 speed road received the Dyna-Sys treatment, allowing for much better adjustment stability.
The front shifting was a real problem after the road long-arm stuff. That was a mistake. They redesigned the FD for better clearance and more consistent cable paths, but the pull ratio stayed the same.
The cable pull only changed once.
aside: Shadow tech moved the rear derailleur into a more protected position, yes, but it also moved the lower pivot forward and improved the cable path. Cable pull remained the same.
Last, you can buy flat-bar 11 speed shifters, so the whole "mix and match" thing is moot.