Dan,
I don't work for Tommaso. Not sure where you got that. I have worked for over thirty years in the bike business. I've owned a bike shop (past tense) for over twenty years. I've represented the US in international competition, I've raced my bike over a thousand times and won a number of bike races and raced against a lot of guys whose names would be familiar to you. Thanks for teaching me that Shimano Tiagra components aren't as good as Dura-Ace, but I'm well acquainted with Shimano. I befriended Yoshi when he was here in the late 70s touting Dura-Ace AX and I toured the plant when I was in Japan in 1990 for the World track championships. I don't recall ever saying there is no difference in quality between a thousand dollar bike and a thirty thousand dollar bike. For the record I've had bikes made for me by Ernesto Colnago, by Bianchi's Reparto Corse, Ron Cooper, Yoshi Konno (before his horrible accident), a couple by Nagasawa, by Peter Weigle, heck I couldn't even list them all. You know what bike I ride every day? An old Schwinn LeTour I pulled out of a dumpster once, sold by Alan's in Oceanside in the 80s. It's a real Schwinn, built down south out of True Temper steel. It's a pretty awful sled, to tell the truth, but I like the idea of riding an All-American bike that someone was actually going to throw away. When I was a young man I really thought equipment MATTERED. It does not. That doesn't mean I think it's all the same. At some point, when I was getting race bikes for free, I realized that although some had a magical feel and I never wanted to give them up, and some were kind of wonky, felt dead, or handled funny, it really wasn't going to make any difference. In other words, if I were to finish third on the dead wonky bike I wasn't going to finish second or first on my favorite bike. And, at the end of the day I was going to be pretty tired either way. I've ridden my bicycle over four hundred miles in a day. It was a stiff steel frame. Would I have been fresher had I ridden a specially made distance bike, maybe a vintage Vitus Carbone 9? Who knows? Who cares? Low spoke count wheels are a really, really stupid idea for nearly everyone who has them. I'll grant you that. The OP (and nearly everyone else) should have 36 spoked rims of traditional design (think Mavic MA40) with butted spokes, at least for daily training. Do I implore him to go out and buy a pair? Absolutely not. The bike he referenced is just fine. I have news for you. Around the world, there are folks riding lots and lots of miles on bikes you wouldn't even bother to insult. That lowly Tiagra crank is light years ahead of either the steel cottered crank I started with or vintage Stronglight cranks that were once considered very good. And Fausto Coppi would have LOVED to have had the Tiagra STI levers. I stand by my words. I lament the demise of American manufacturing. But today's ten thousand dollar Pinarello is made in China. And bicycles are really nothing much more than glorified plumbing. This simplicity is their beauty. For a guy like the OP it's nice to have wider tires (again, get those wheels tensioned, trued, and stress-relieved by a good mechanic if you're lucky enough to find one) and indexed shifting. And it's easy to look down upon a lowly thousand dollar bike from China. But there are a million Chinese who probably ride a lot more than you do who would be thrilled to have that bike. And an aside, and apropo of nothing: I am jingoistic. I happen to believe that Ross Perot was right. I work in academia and in the last fifteen years I've seen a quantum shift in exchange students, who now make up about eighty percent of our grad school (100 in fields such as math). They used to ride around on old Huffys with milk crates lashed to the back. Now they drive Bentleys, Ferraris, Lambos, and Aston Martins. In my opinion this is a direct result of the gutting of the US middle class, which we owe in large part to giving up our manufacturing (again, IMO, and I'm not arguing the point). Was that incendiary? Not compared to this: Having said that, about the most consistently horrible bicycle I've ever seen was the PA built Cannondale of the 80s. They rode like buckboards, the plastic top tube cable guides fell off, and the bottom bracket was never square with the dropouts, so that some riders developed knee problems and many bikes could not have the front derailleur adjusted properly. Never mind they were ugly as home made sin. "But I had one and it was great!" Sure it was. Because bikes are simple devices, like shoes or hats. Even large errors in construction often go unnoticed. And Dan, you're not WRONG. And neither am I. We just have different points of view. To me, the bicycle is primarily a tool. One with which I've earned my living for the first forty years of my life. You're an enthusiast. It's like the difference between a brewmaster and a beer snob. The beer snob loves to make fun of Budweiser and tell everyone it's swill not worth drinking. The brewmaster appreciates how consistent the product is. (I owned a home brew supply store for fifteen years.)