Shimano mechanical has bomb proof shifting up until the shifters decide they're hungry for your cables-not ideal for internal routing, especially without end to end cable housing.
Agreed. I wouldn't build mechanical fully integrated bikes anymore. I assume the bike is only partially integrated, which makes it shift and brake better, and much easier to travel with, maintain, service, and so on. If you assume that the bike shop services your bike at least some of the time, the simpler, humbler bike ends up much, much cheaper over its life time. Trouble shooting anything on a fully integrated bike takes multiple times longer, unfortunately. So when you price stuff, financially, even if you assume your own time costs 5 bucks an hour, the simpler bike will be much cheaper, easier to live with and so on.
It's quite likely that my next bike won't be fully integrated. At the very least, i'd want to have hoses routed under the stem and not inside the stem. I think it's a logical evolution (cheaper in labour, simpler, easier to travel with...).
Also, when something electronic fails, it goes in the bin, and even if ER9, a new RD costs ~150 eur (or more). Meanwhile, that can be the cost of the entire groupset... And i've never had shimano / sram mechanical randomly die on me.
Basically, if i were to model something with discounted cash flows and probability weighted events like electronics component failure, service, brain damage from having to source parts down the road and so on, the mechanical, simpler bike would win by a lot.
Therefore, depends on what "budget" means in the 1st place. And i'm saying this after 15 integrated bikes. Someone who's never had a pretty fully integrated bike probably wants one because it's pretty, it was my starting point on this forum 1000+ messages ago
Funny how things and life tend to go full circle
