in June I got a MTB with mechanical disc and even those are pretty dang powerful. But I have rim brakes on my road and CX bikes, and while maybe my CX racing would benefit from disc brakes, I’m mainly a fair weather cyclist and have never felt let down by the rim brakes. As long as there are parts, I’m sticking with rim brakes and am in no rush to convert everything
I agree 100%. Disc vs. rim doesn’t have to be a religious war. There are pluses on both sides.
I have discs on my mountain and gravel bikes and I’d hate to go back to the days of cantilever brakes. Still, discs brakes have been a constant pain in the ass for me - finicky, rubbing, noise, etc. And I hate Sram dot fluid!
The plus side to disc brakes on the road is clearance. You can get bikes now with tons of clearance and run an aero optimized wheelset (30-32mm wide rim) with some really fast GP5000s in 28mm or 30mm. With a setup like that I think you achieve the best combination of aero, comfort, and power (hysteresis) loss over rough roads.
It also enables the “all road” category of bike which is a road bike that can double as a gravel bike or vice versa.
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Used to run up and down a few roads in Thorpe st Andrew whilst stopping over. they were steep!
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Small world - I live in Thorpe! They’re decently steep, but all quite short. During my KOM hunting phase I collected Harvey Lane (1 min PR), Thunder Lane, Pound Lane, Telegraph Lane East, Ketts Hill (not Thorpe, but a good one)!
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Try using a different compound brake pads. If it’s squealing and not contaminated, you’re probably using some type of sintered metal pads. Try organic pads instead.
As for maintenance?
Once you’ve done it a couple of time, it is way faster and easier to change pads, bleed brakes etc than it is to fiddle with rim brakes. Where you have the cables, cable housing, adjusting the pads, having to readjust the pads every time you swap wheels and so on.
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No you’re not being a grouch. I’m a reluctant disc user, for the same reasons you outline. I had great braking with dura-ace rim brakes, and now I have equally good, but much fussier, noisier braking. They warp and straighten with the heat and cooling, and make a racket in the wet and mucky weather. You can’t see the wear on the pads at a glance in the way you can with rim brakes. Thru-axles are slower to change, with no standard design across bikes, and often a tool needed where the QR was simplicity perfected.
The only advantages I can genuinely see are:
It’s cheaper to replace a rotor than a whole wheel. If you buy some nice wheels you are no longer buying a consumable. (And yes, I have worn through an aluminium rim, resulting a very big bang!)
Bigger tyres. Which is helpful considering the state of UK roads. But this seems to me no better than those folk who buy ever bigger SUVs to cope with the roads that they’re churned up.
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Thunder lane was the one! Used to stay at the hotel right by it. Tried riding up it on one of those yellow town bikes a few years ago 
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Because it was impossible to set up the rear calliper without it dragging. Close examination revealed that on tightening the mounting bolts, it tilted slightly to the left. There was a thin ridge where the paint met the mount on the outside of both mounts. Once it was removed, the rubbing went away.
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I have 4 bikes with disc brakes. I’ve never had a problem with any of them.
If they squeal, I clean the pads and rotor with rubbing alcohol. That’s a pretty easy fix.
The trickiest part is aligning the calipers so they are centered on the rotor. But you get the hang of that after doing it wrong 5 times 
. And once that’s done, it’s pretty much zero maintenance until time to replace pads, or do a bleed. Admittedly, doing a bleed is a bit of a pain, but I’ve only needed to do that on my MTBs which get much higher braking loads vs my gravel/road bikes.
Maybe disc brakes are like cars - sometimes you just get a lemon?? They’ve been flawless for me.
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You should ride what makes you happy. A lot of things are subjective when it comes to bikes. Some people like the sound of noisy hubs, I don’t care for that (noisy hubs work well to alert pedestrians of my presence, that’s about it). Other people like singing rim brake tracks and think this is more musical than a disc brake squealing in the rain, I don’t care (neither a plus nor a minus).
I don’t quite share your opinion, e. g. I find disc brakes much easier to service than rim brakes. And if I paid top €€€€ for a pair of carbon wheels, no way I’d want to ride on aluminum clinchers just because it might rain that day. Or worse, I swap wheels, but forgot to swap brake pads. Thank you, but no thank you.
But you do you! It’s your bike. If you prefer rim brakes, get one with rim brakes. Although the only thing I would add is that they are indeed close to dying out, most new bikes come with disc brakes as standard. But for the time being, that’s not a problem — yet.
I prefer rim brakes but I can’t ignore all the positives of disc brakes, namely the lack of carbon fiber wheel wear.
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With modern rims and the correct pads, that is hardly a thing. I have a set of carbon rims with 10K+ miles on them and no noticeable wear.
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This is one of the odd things about disc brakes…they solve a problem that was essentially a poor design choice.
Carbon is a horrible material for a braking track. But both consumers and engineers saw that they could get lighter wheels if they went away from alloy braking surfaces. …and too often weight still rules.
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My disc brake road bikes have never been fussy. Ridden plenty thousands of miles without ever having to even adjust them. Even when changing pads. No squeals or rubs. Now when wet I’ll get the occassional ping, but you get that with mountain bikes that have a lot more clearance so either I’m used to it riding discs on mountain bikes for so long or it just never bothered me.
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I quite liked the HED Jets (iirc); 50mm carbon fairing with an alloy track. They were a little on the weighty side, but I still suspect the net effect will be/was lighter than a disc setup. I wonder if they still make them… must be a niche product now, if so.
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Yup…the Jet 5’s were my wheels as late as 2018. Aero, fast and reasonably light but certainly not the lightest. But the weight never impacted my performance, even when we took a long weekend to the mountains in NC…I was still dropping all my riding buddies…
Plus they had a nice road noise to them…just sounded fast. 
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[quote=“RecoveryRide, post:1, topic:67900”]
Bonus points if you think 10 speed Record was the high point of Western civilization [/quote]
I want to say yes and still have ten speed campy record on two bikes. With enough spares to bring them to the grave with me. Campy was my company since the late 70s. Even have a set of Record OR mtn bike cantis on my antique (early 90s) bike with Microdrive. Just because the OR brakes were like little jewels. We won’t talk about the vintage SR/SR stuff or frames collecting dust.
So with my Campy fan boy bonafides out of the way…
DuraAce 7800/7900 and 7950 (compact) and 7970 (Di2) will give Record/Chorus Ten Speed a pretty good run for the money in a “best ever” discussion.
Everything after the best 10s groups has been downhill though. LOL
*** Rim Brakes ***
On mountain there is no question it is disk all day every day.
On road, I’m a rim brake die hard. Don’t need disk and have so many nice rim brake wheelsets hanging in the rafters its a no go to change brake systems.
That said… am rapidly approaching the time in life when a shed full of bikes and wheels gets replaced by a quiver killer. That quiver killer will certainly have disk brakes. Not for stopping power, but to easily accommodate different size tires and rims. Modern side pull rim brakes are great, but cantis, meh, not so much.
So while I share the brotherhood of the rim brake gestalt, the writing is on the wall.
ps: I have the original EE Brakes on my stupid light hill climb bike. They look cool, but as brakes they suck. DuraAce or Record brakes of the same vintage are much better at stopping a bicycle. Same thing for a set of Zero G’s that I ran for years (because they look cool but were just OK stoppers). Whenever I ride the chi-chi brakes bikes and then get back on a bike with good old D/A or Record side pulls I’ll ask myself, much like Dierks Bentley did: “What was I thinking”?
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I have 2 pairs of NOS Record OR cantis in my gear box, one pair still NIB.
I just can’t decide what to do with them at this point.
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If we team up now, we can corner the market!!!
They are very pretty parts. I’m leaning toward stripping my old bikes and putting the parts on EBay or just giving them to a collector to carry on the flame.
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Same…but I hate to get rid of them. I think I got them for like $30 at a bike swap or something stoopid like that. Was gonna build up a cool CX bike, but never got around to it.
I’m not gonna ever put them on a bike at this point, so I might as well dump 'em…but as you note, they are just gorgeous.
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