>>1716948depends on which era of campy you're talking about
Campagnolo of the 1950s through early 80s simply built the same derailleur over and over and over. They were not particularly light. They did not shift particularly well. But they were precisely crafted to continue shifting just as shittily as the day they were taken out of the box, forever. Racers liked them because most other derailleurs in late 50s/early 60s were fragile and fiddly, and then they kept using them for decades due to institutional inertia and superstition, AKA tradition.
Technologically, these derailleurs were crap. They kept making non-drop-parallelogram derailleurs a decade after they were relevant in the market. Advancing technology championed by Suntour and Shimano piledrived the entire euro cycling industry in the 80s and Campy only survived by the skin of it's teeth because it was the traditional racer's derailleur.
Anyone waxing poetic about Campy Nuovo Record gear or whatever from the 60s and 70s is a senile boomer. Probably a TDF fan who never actually rode bikes much.
Campy products from the mid-80s through the end of the 90s were dreadful - not only were they still heavier and shittier than the competition, but all the quality was gone. Just shitty attempts to copy Suntour and Shimano parts. The less said about them the better.
The kind of people who stuck with Campy through this period are the same kind of people who stuck with Apple through the early PowerPC years and MacOS 7/8/9 - extremely stubborn loyalists who were nostalgic for past dominance and accusing the newly-dominant products of being soulless and/or evil.
Campy completely reinvented itself as a maker of lightweight components in the early 2000s with a big emphasis on innovative materials, like carbon. Components from the last 20 years are quite nice, abet expensive and sometimes fragile.
