Retrogrouchy Like A Fox

I'm sort of obsessed right now with this tweet from Matt Phillips, who if I recall correctly is the testing director for Bicycling magazine:

Mountain bikes—full sus 29ers especially—have never been more capable. They make riding rough, steep, & challenging terrain easier, safer, more fun. So why is the dominant trend in mainstream trail design rolling, smooth, 4ft wide trails with zero features or personality?

— Matt Phillips (@ilikesushi) November 25, 2018

On one hand it comes off as a humblebrag: trails are too easy for me these days thanks to those darn millennials and their PC agenda.  On the other, it seems to be suggesting that because today's expensive, high-end bikes make riding difficult trails easy, we should make the trails more technical to maintain a baseline of perceived difficulty, thus requiring cyclists to remain on the bleeding edge of tech in order to enjoy themselves.  This is like saying we should starve public transit while letting our infrastructure go to shit and instead set policy that encourages people to drive around in oversized all-terrain vehicles.

Oh wait, that's what we're doing.

Granted, the "problem" Matt Phillips is describing is not really a problem around these parts.  Here, it's rooty and rocky, and unless you rip all the trees and boulders out and bulldoze everything flat that's not going to change.  If anything I encounter more and more built features designed to indulge people who ride around on bikes with lots of suspension and ride over the same obstacle fifty times in a row while blasting shitty music from their Bluetooth speakers and making videos of themselves with their iPhones.

Nevertheless, I'll certainly take his word that it's happening where he is, in which case my question is...why is this such a bad thing?  What, ultimately, is the point of riding these overwrought cutting-edge mountain bikes if they're just making things, as he says, "easier, safer, more fun"?  Are the bikes and trails just supposed to keep getting proportionately burlier until we're riding all-terrain recumbents that look like Mars rovers?  It seems to me that these darn avocado-munching millennials are realizing the "ever-increasing firepower" approach to bikes is kind of silly, hence the gravel bike phenomenon--which is what I was getting at awhile back in this Outside column:

At the same time, the bicycle industry seems to react in a roundabout way when it comes to riding off-road. Common wisdom holds that the gravel bike was a response to the limitations of the road bike, but wasn’t it just as much of a response to the limitations of all those over-suspended mountain bikes ill-suited to the long haul? Basically with gravel bikes and “road plus” and all the rest of it, we’ve just reinvented the rigid mountain bike and added drop bars—which is pretty much exactly what John Tomac was riding almost 30 years ago.

In light of this, doesn't it make sense to enjoy these rolling, smooth trails on simpler bicycles?  Isn't the appearance of having "zero features or personality" a function of riding a bike that's designed to isolate the rider from any trail features or personality that might be present?  Isn't it kind of silly we're now at the point where even your saddle has to telescope, and if you don't get to use that feature on a ride then it's because the trail is somehow featureless and devoid of personality?

Well, the answers are obviously yes, yes, and yes.

In any case, there's really only one conclusion to all of this, which is that I spend WAY too much time thinking about this stuff.  But who can blame me?  Reality is just too depressing.