Excellent points.
At the moment, what’s driving me to stay with the M, is that to get the reach feeling “intuitive”/balanced I would be running a 50-70mm stem, which should play well with the trail figure. I may go for that 460 AtoC fork after all.
Going S will have me going for an even longer stem, and that may not play well with the 87-91 trail figure. I do plan to descend and bump through some pretty chunky areas at times.
What really got me understanding the trail/wheelsbase/HTA dynamic were these two videos:
Not to mention, Ben Delaney’s list of test gravel bikes that he enjoyed the handling: The new v4 Stigmata and new Grail are quite in range of my calculated bike.
