Originally Posted by Gresp15C

One of my bikes has those, a Schwinn frame from the 80s. They actually work great.

Since I'm a curious character, when I got that frame, I had to research the clips. Here's what I learned. For a long time, the major bike makers had been keeping records on all sorts of bike failures that resulted in either warranty claims or lawsuits -- their only sources of information about reliability. My guesstimate (from numbers in a lawsuit transcript) is that there were maybe between one and two dozen front wheel detachment failures per year being reported. Both nutted and QR wheels. That's a terrible number for engineers, enough to draw attention but not enough to build up good statistics. They really couldn't figure out if the problem was due to user error or a design issue. But engineers are engineers, and it's pretty widespread among engineers that you don't make a product with a user adjustment that lets people hurt themselves if it's not vital to function (like a kitchen knife) and easily avoided.

Frank Brilando at Schwinn invented those clips. Schwinn offered to license the patent, but on prohibitive terms, so the industry went looking for other solutions and came up with the tabs. After secondary retention was introduced, front wheel detachment failures went down virtually to zero, on both nutted and QR axles. Now the numbers are so small that gathering actionable data would be impossible.

I work in a product development setting, and the engineers don't talk about lawyers. They talk about making good, safe products. The lawyer thing comes about because the US tends to regulate things in a retroactive fashion, allowing the tort system to take care of issues rather than trying to regulate everything proactively. In this case, the system allowed the industry to come up with its own solution before regulators got involved.

Personally, filing off the tabs strikes me as a just a bit too precious, and seems like a badge issue on web forums. I've never known a cyclist in real life who was bothered by the tabs.