To be honest, i'm not so sure how the slack head angle is gonna affect my handling. Trident Thrust has a head angle of 70*, is it really that bad? The Tideace is also a 70* head angle from their geometry. Is it really that bad? I'm a pretty seasoned racer, but over the last few years i haven't done a whole lot of racing. I would consider my handling skills pretty good. I race as a CAT 1 and haven't really worried about head angle in my past builds. I didn't like the Tideace because I wanted to go with a BSA bb standard.
By the way, I'm old school, started racing in the 90's until mid 2000's. I like just traditional looking hardtails, simple looking. I don't even care for fulls suspension or really the 29r platform. That is why I went the 27.5 route when getting back into mt. biking. I'm probably gonna order two frames, a 27.5 and a 29r. That Trident Thrust seems to fit my needs and the geometry seems to fit my needs. I've always raced a smaller frame to throw around and handle around the tight technical singletrack, but racing nowadays seem to be getting away from that with more fire roads and doubletrack, hence the reason I may go with a 29r frame as well. I'm not a big fan of the funky top tube on the frame you linked.
