“This is somewhat of an ethics question, is it not?”
this is not an ethics question. it’s really a math question, as was originally stated. it’s a math problem more than any other kind of problem. you can’t sit aboard and pedal an ethic. a 5’4" lady is looking up at you through large brown hypthetical eyes, right now, in your retail store, hoping for an answer, and you’re on the spot.
now, one thing i think worth noting, i got a look at the fit specs of a particular team - a men’s pro tour team - that had a notable number of riders of shorter stature. the mean saddle setback was 9 percent of saddle height, that is, if a saddle height was 68cm the saddle nose position v the BB was right on about 61mm, as a mean. and this flowed to those riding saddle heights fairly low. so…
yes, this hypthetical gal’s saddle setback is significant, but, by “significant” we’re talking about 3mm behind 9 percent of her saddle height (60mm rather than 57mm). you might say that this is not quite fair because, while riders are scalable, saddles are not. saddles are a fixed distance (145mm, 160mm, etc., depending on the saddle) from the center of the saddle’s rails forward to the nose. that established, this gal’s sitting position is not wholly different than that of a lot of taller riders, that is, if you scale down a taller rider you won’t find that this gal’s position is wholly out of whack.
what makes this lady’s saddle setback problematic is that it pulls back the front of the bike and that creates problems we’re familiar with once we try to find complete bike solutions. some (but not all) of these problems are caused by the 700c wheel.
i write the above only because i think we realize that we can’t give women everything they want, or think they want, in a bike because of the mechanical problems associated with bike architecture. however, for those who think that a 60mm setback is necessarily bad, and 40mm of setback, 30mm, 20mm is necessarily good, i ask whether the driver in bike fit is to find a comfortable, powerful position; or to find a position underneath which sits a choice of available production bikes; and whether there’s anything about how that bike handles that we ought consider?
can we draw the distance between these 3 imperatives down, and provide a selection of options that are comfortable, powerful, that handle well, and that are available? that’s the question i’m asking with this hypothetical conundrum. i would prefer not to argue bike theory in this thread. if you’d like to do so, this forum is available precisely for that, i would just ask you to incept a separate thread for that and i’m happy to participate. i’d like to return below to just the question of how to service this hypothetical young lady’s needs.