Rant on the right bike for the rider.

Every day I see people buying bikes that don't really seem like the best things for them, and maybe part of that is that there aren't really manybikes that would really suit the riding that most people do. I'm talking about road bikes here, by the way, since mountain bikes are doing fine, what with all the choices there are out there, there's usually something that will work pretty well–even if you're just looking for stuff that's available in production bikes–but for road bikes the situation is different. These days, and I say these days realizing that it has pretty much always been this way, most road bikes are essentially racing bikes. It seems road riding is legitimized by road racing, and therefore it aspires to the ideal of the racer, and yet at the same time many, and sometimes I think most road riders willingly admit that they aren't racers and have no intention of being such.
This being the case, why is it that the vast majority of road bikes are at best racing bikes with slightly lower gearing?
Maybe part of it is because the racing bikes as such, are unappetizing to the average (and from what I've seen, there is some sort of an average) rider. In order to make the bike something that Joe Somebody wants, it needs be to fitted with gears that allow him to get it up a hill. He does tend to think that its light-weight will help in that regard, and to some small extent it does, but for most folks, not nearly as much as lower gears would for those times when they are slogging up some seemingly interminable climb.
But problems arise here too: can Mr. Guy get gears that are low enough with a compact double, or will he have to go with a triple and have to deal with the sloppy shifting that comes with racing-short chainstays combined with a triple-chainring setup in front? Of course there's also the option of a wide range cassette in back, but with modern 10-speed drivetrians, the options are limited to the IRD wide-range cassettes, (though maybe when the SRAM XX cassettes become widely available they'll make some improvement) combined with a mountain bike rear derailleur, and for some reason, be it the less-than-amazing IRD cassette or some slight difference in the cable-pull requirements of the mountain vs. road rear derailleurs, this option never seems to work out very well. This last complaint is still present when using 9-speed setups, which it would seem, would work better with the mountain bike cassette and derailleur, but problems with shifting still arise.
So anyway, I wish companies would just stretch the chainstays out a bit, design their derailleur hangers to have a bit more b-tension built in, and just accept that a lot of people need lower gears. Some of these considerations went in to the ideas behind this latest bike I built (the one in the first post), though, really most of my considerations for that revolved around having nice clearance for the fenders and pump. So there. That's my rant: not definitive, just a thought...to think about.