>>1715425Road bikes are in a kind of shitty place now due to the disc meme being rammed down everyone's throat. A cheap road disc brake bike is going to be heavy, stiff in all the wrong ways, and come with garbage /csg/ brakes that are worse at doing their job than the decent rim brakes they replaced, while being more expensive. Inexpensive rim brake models are getting harder to find because they're no longer being made. The Specialized Allez, Canyon Endurance AL 7, and Giant Contend SL1 are the best inexpensive roadies but good luck finding them new, particularly now that it's end of season in the corona era. The Ribble R872 and 725 are good deals, but I'd avoid the Tiagra base model because Tiagra in its current incarnation is a dead end. Shimano made it incompatible with everything else they make, including previous generations of 2x10. Makes parts hunting even more of a bitch. If you can find something with Sora, rim brakes, weighs around 9kg or so, hopefully that would be around 1000 eurosheckels?
>>1715464If you don't think there's a big difference between low-end, midrange, and high-end, I don't think you've ridden anything better than low end or maybe low-midrange. A couple of years ago I was out of country and got a Specialized Diverge E5 (the Claris cheapie) to ride, and christ that thing was a slug compared to the higher-end bikes I normally ride. It wasn't some random tiny percentage of some unknown holistic value difference, it was night and day. The bike was just so bloody slow to do anything. Accelerate, climb, change directions, brake. Better wheels would have improved it a great deal, and it would have benefitted from a better groupset and brakes, but at the end of the day the frame would always have been a limitation. Have had similar experiences with a Topstone AL. Still, the Diverge was much better than having no bike at all and I had a lot of great rides on it. Hopefully next time I go to weeb heaven I'll be able to take one of my bikes.
