I understand the intent, but as lovely as it is, it would keep me from buying the bike. As a tall rider with long legs, 640 mm is the minimum stack I would consider acceptable on an XL all mountain/enduro frame, and my preference would be for 650 mm to 660 mm. I could see the stack numbers they chose working on the 120 mm travel version of the frame, but not the 150 mm one.
I know that high-rise bars are a thing, but to get my bars to within a reasonable drop from my saddle is going to severely limit the choice of bars available to me, and I would still have to use a tall stack of spacers. This compromises front end stiffness and aesthetics (which does matter to me when I'm spending this much on a bike), and it eats into the effective top tube and reach.
I think at this point, I'm just feeling somewhat annoyed by geometry decisions that penalize riders on either end of the height bell curve. The stack grows 10 mm across 3 frame sizes, while the reach grows by 50 mm. According to their geometry chart, that means they are suggesting that a rider that is 6'4 would only want their bars 10 mm higher than a 5'3 rider, and vice versa. There is something clearly off about that recommendation!
I know that not all bikes are for all people, but I feel like they failed to hit a reasonable happy medium on a key geometry number, and that is disqualifying for me. Nonetheless, I am still deeply impressed by the quality of the manufacturing and the ethic behind it, and I wish them all the luck in the world with it. I hope that future bikes from WAO will have somewhat more reasonable stack heights. It's probably a long ways off, but I would also love to see them expand their capacity enough to take on production for some other smaller BC based companies. A made in BC Forbidden would be so hot!
