This joke is nearly as old as road disc brakes.

Oh don't be such a debbie downer!

I laughed at the tongue and cheek in the first few paragraphs and thought I should link it on ST as Tom A would get kick out of it. Then I saw he made a comment below the article

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Matt

Shame you need a $1200 aluminum rim brake wheelset to match the performance of my 105 disc brakes and wheels. Man, this innovation in the bike industry is really driving up the prices :P

My old boss (Bill McCready, owner of Santana) was making that joke decades ago...

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"I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10, and I don't know why!"

Maybe there is a reason it took the bike industry 20 years to adopt disc brakes for road bikes, after doing it for mountain bikes. I can't find any related to technology, as the conditions in mountain biking are much harder to disc brakes than in the road.

Yes, disc brake technology is superior to rim brake technology, but the results are marginally better in very specific conditions at best. Once the bike industry ran out of gimmicks forcing us to upgrade, they resorted to disc brakes.

Perhaps when we are all on disc brakes the move will be to "integrated" disc brakes ;-)

This already happened in other industries. For example ski boots, which moved to the "clearly superior" hinged rear opening, and a decade later back to the "clearly superior" traditional design.