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I'm not suggesting to get an ill fitting bike !
What i found personnally is that longer geo and slacker forks get a bit frustrating on road and especially climbs. I would try to stick with the most agressive of gravel frames. Along the lines of some of the mentionned frames like santa cruz stigmata.
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What I was looking for in geometry was:
- clearance for bigish tyres, close to current bike which can take 40mm
- mounts for mudguards
- relaxed / stable frame, so low BB (as close to 80 as possible, but not less than 75mm BB drop, slack-ish seat angle (none are very slack, there's nothing less than 73 and most are 73.5-74.5) and long-ish wheel base (arbitrarily I wanted > 1m).
- high stack / long head tube. Current bike has a good few spacers under the stem - would like not to need so many, so stack > 550-580. Stack to reach ratio >1.45.
I don't know if my criteria will actually give me a bike that I'll enjoy riding, but I can't blame anyone else if it doesn't - and I'll know to get something different next time!
I wasn't looking for something racy that I'd use on a crit or even a summer sportive, more a bike that won't be too much effort when I'm plodding along at 15km/h in the dark when it's pissing rain after I've been riding for a week.
The Stigmata wasn't bad, just a little racier than I was after. I'd need the smallest size (52 - I had a preference for bikes where I don't need their smallest size - probably a bit irrational but I think things get a bit distorted at the extremes!) so that the reach wasn't too long. The BB drop is good (74mm), HT long for a small bike (130) but the seat tube is a bit steep at 74.5. That was probably what ruled it out for me.
I had another near miss when I started to look at the Chinese frames. The Yoeleo G21, which looks really good on some aspects, eg has lowest BB apart from Domane and Diverge, but is just a few mm too long for me. When I drop down a size to fix that, the seat angle gets steep (75) and the head tube short (90), so no good.
Other than tyre clearance I didn't find there was much difference between bikes positioned as road vs gravel - which won't be surprising to anyone sceptical about gravel being a marketing concept, etc.
- clearance for bigish tyres, close to current bike which can take 40mm
To me the differences in geo are unlikely to be as noticeable as features will be beneficial like mudguard fixing, mounts, routing, tyre clearance.
I’d focus on geo that fits over genre of geo.