That’s interesting. Well first off, I defer to @mcneese.chad because I have only ridden a 2T a few times and didn’t realize there was the difference that he feels. So, I might just outright be wrong.
That said, yeah, the tldr is that I try to match my gearing to my workout and my goals. Long endurance effort? I’m not going to be in 34/25. Short spiky stuff? Well, then I often do go little ring up front because I find that on my Kickr, it responds faster to changes. And if I was training 20 second high force, low speed real world stuff, I’d replicate that in gearing.
I think the high level takeaway for me is that, just like how TSS isn’t the end all be all of how hard a workout is, wattage and cadence aren’t the only inputs to how a workout ‘feels.’ I am very confident that I can feel a difference between very high and low flywheel speed, even with the same power and cadence. Logically, it then tracks to me that if you’re training for real world benefits, it makes sense to try to match what you’ll get IRL.