Confess about your geared ride

Bike design and manufacturing has improved - I choose to embrace this improvement.

Oooff.

I know this is tantamount to heresy on here, but modern bikes are far superior in terms of ride quality, stiffness, weight and so on. I love the De Rosa, but it doesn't compare to the Paduano.

Pretty bikes can hang (on a wall)

Would rather have a functioning bike

Bike design and manufacturing may have improved, but that's not my priority at all. I want pretty bikes, and I want to ride them, as well. How a bike looks is important to me, and certainly more important than high-end mechanical quality. I'm not a very good rider; a bike of average quality will do me just fine, so improvements in manufacturing are of little importance to me.

One of my road bikes is a Pogliaghi frame (not handbuilt, and post-Sante Pogliaghi, I hasten to add) with Columbus SLX tubing. That ride quality is easily good enough for me--runs dependably and straight, I feel very much at ease on it, it smooths out poor road surfaces wonderfully well--, and I don't care if more modern frames might handle better.

Also, there is a widespread modern tendency to separate aesthetics from 'function'. Looks can easily be considered an aspect of the function of an object. Looks may not be important to you, and you may find other aspects of function more important, but if you like the way an object looks, then that will contribute to your appreciation of its quality. It can increase your enjoyment of using it (it certainly does this for me)--not because you want to, say, ride, posing, through certain fashionable areas and thereby achieve an unrelated outcome, but simply for the sake of enjoying using a beautiful object. It certainly does this for me.

In terms of looks, for me bike design has gone from bad to worse in the last fifteen or so years. I've said before that my taste is very simple and boring--I basically like classic, even-diameter, round-tubed, horizontal top tube bikes. Maybe bike design is now more diverse and exciting to people who are keen on improving mechanical qualities, but those people might well have no complaint if the same mechanical qualities could be accommodated in a classical geometry, even if they didn't need it. By contrast, I would have no complaint if the same looks could be accommodated around improved mechanical function, even if I didn't need it. As long as both concerns aren't accommodated in one bike, it's a question of priorities.

(I know that some people will say that they like more modern, more sporty-looking bikes, with curvy tubes, innovative seatstay bends, large zippy letters on deep-section road wheels, or whatever, better aesthetically as well as mechanically, but while such bikes may 'jump out' more--looking more exciting, more shouty, with more flickering movement in the design, etc. (so have qualities that many people can appreciate)--, I disagree that these look more 'beautiful', although of course justifying that distinction is difficult. It's not arguing about taste as such, but about possible reasons for choice more generally, e.g. the above-mentioned priorities.)