>>1340796The reason why people love Suntour is that their higher-end groups (Cyclone, Superbe/Sprint, Superbe Pro, XC Pro) function better than other friction systems and look nice, and there's always that romance about the things we lost along the journey to where we are today.
Suntour invented the slant parallelogram RD in the late 60s. It was better than anything else at the time, and their pricing strategy had even their high end stuff put on cheap bikes. Their philosophy was do a small markup on production costs, rather than charge what the market would bear, because then everyone could have nice things. It was an ethical thing to Junzo Kawai, but it was a bad business decision. It earned them an unfair rep for being crap for poors, and didn't allow them much profit to use to invest in R&D. Get woke go broke. Shimano went the opposite route, charged as much as they could get for their parts, and invested heavily into R&D (while Campy invested their profits into god knows what), while also moving production to Taiwan. Then the yen shock hit, erasing Suntour's tiny profits, and making it even harder for them to introduce a functional indexed system until well after Shimano had overtaken them.
Neither Suntour nor Campy realized that casuals wanted indexing, as their friction systems worked well, particularly Suntour's. Shimano was awful. Early indexed systems were worse at shifting and fell out of adjustment all the fucking time, too, but that didn't matter. Shimano knew that people liked the convenience during the test ride. Plus, their massive R&D effort fixed the problems after a few years.
European chauvinism is what prevented Campy from initially doing what Shimano did and releasing Suntour clones as soon as their patent expired, which led to wacky experiments that never took, until they eventually gave up and copied what the Japs were doing.
