Believe you me, I know enough Starling fans & owners* that I never discuss the Starling Fallacy in public lest some rabid stranger attacks me with their EDC tool. My only escape would be to yell something bad about Banshee's cable routing or frame sizing and then drop to the floor and hope the fanboys would take each other out while I crawled to safety.
*I know saying "fans & owners" sounds redundant but Starling is one of those companies where people who've never so much a glimpsed one in real life will go full Man-On-Fire on you in an effort to make you see that they're the best riding bike on the planet.
**I have not ridden a Starling-Starling. But I've ridden lots and lots of Starlings if you know what I mean. I like them, a lot, except for the ones that EAT shocks because they rely on them too much as a structural element (note, many multi-pivot bikes do this too) but true uni-pivots are much more quirky to ride than a VPP, DW, Horst Link, (good) Linkage-Driven-Single-Pivot, Split-Pivot, SwitchInfinity, etc. There's a solid reason all those bikes have lots of bearings.
If Cannondale had released a modern Prophet I would have been stoked and they would have sold next to _none_. Same for a modern meat-motored Heckler/SuperLight, or the twenty-year-old Marin B-17 (I always thought they looked good).
If telling yourself that the frame material that adds the je ne sais quoi factor works for you I'm fully in your corner! I truly think bikes do ride significantly better when we apply personal value to them - at least that's how it works with my Waltworks.
Sept. 2, 2021, 9:24 p.m. - Andrew Major
Believe you me, I know enough Starling fans & owners* that I never discuss the Starling Fallacy in public lest some rabid stranger attacks me with their EDC tool. My only escape would be to yell something bad about Banshee's cable routing or frame sizing and then drop to the floor and hope the fanboys would take each other out while I crawled to safety. *I know saying "fans & owners" sounds redundant but Starling is one of those companies where people who've never so much a glimpsed one in real life will go full Man-On-Fire on you in an effort to make you see that they're the best riding bike on the planet. **I have not ridden a Starling-Starling. But I've ridden lots and lots of Starlings if you know what I mean. I like them, a lot, except for the ones that EAT shocks because they rely on them too much as a structural element (note, many multi-pivot bikes do this too) but true uni-pivots are much more quirky to ride than a VPP, DW, Horst Link, (good) Linkage-Driven-Single-Pivot, Split-Pivot, SwitchInfinity, etc. There's a solid reason all those bikes have lots of bearings. If Cannondale had released a modern Prophet I would have been stoked and they would have sold next to _none_. Same for a modern meat-motored Heckler/SuperLight, or the twenty-year-old Marin B-17 (I always thought they looked good). If telling yourself that the frame material that adds the je ne sais quoi factor works for you I'm fully in your corner! I truly think bikes do ride significantly better when we apply personal value to them - at least that's how it works with my Waltworks.