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@gbj_tester
Mavic have done it too. The small advantage is that the spoke bracing angle is slightly improved on the drive side, where it is most needed on highly dished 8/9/10-speed wheels. The small disadvantage in the olden days was that all the drive torque has to go through the barrel of the hubshell before being sent to the rim. This was a problem in the olden days*, because hub barrels were made as small as possible to just wrap around a 10mm axle. Now the axle is bigger,so the hub barrel has no choice but to be bigger and they make them a bit bigger still to increase torsional stiffness. Since torsional stiffness of the hub barrel rises as the fourth power of diameter, you can see that it didn't take much of an increase in diameter to make the old problem of hub wind up all but disappear.
*in the even older days, hub barrels were a separate component from the flanges and torque transfer across the hub relied on friction in the press fit