Dec. 19, 2014, 4:16 p.m. -  Pete Roggeman

#!markdown It's a fair point, Yeti-freak. Reference our Nomad review and you'll see exactly what you're asking for. In that case we were given a bike as a long term test platform, and had time to do some swapping out of suspension components (and have more coming for the future). However in this case, we simply haven't had enough time with the bike. And, the glib answer is: "because that's the way it's being sold" at least for now, before it's available as a frame only. For every buyer like you who plans to buy a frame and hand pick each part, there are 10 that might wish they could, but ultimately won't - for those 10 to 1, hearing about the individual parts does matter, especially because the parts that were chosen for a particular build were done quite deliberately by the product manager. So, long answer made short: I hear you, and sometimes we do/will do that (same with other publications) but often it either isn't feasible due to time, or relevant to the majority of readers. Don't think I'm being dismissive, though - what you're positing here is exactly the reason that we sometimes take on long term test bikes.