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@6pt
The arai ones are pretty tricky to source now. I'm not sure if a drum is worth the hassle - we did mountains heavily laden with only two rim brakes with no issues, and @Hovis has scrapped his, I think. We also met a couple with a beautiful custom co-motion (couplers and all) and they were solely doing mountains – their holiday was playing in the picos –with just ultegra rim brakes. Not too heavily laden though.
If I was doing everything from scratch I'd try and start with discs and a modern 145 spaced frame because it offers the greatest variety of modern tandem bits, as opposed to my cobbled together collection of hard-wearing touring bits and tandem-specific where I could fit them. The in-between option is to get a middling frame, go threadless, stick a wound-up fork with disc mounts in there and have a disc on the front and rim on the back (do wound ups come in 1inch? Who knows).