Shimano hasn’t done themselves any favors with their obnoxious decades-long habit of engineering intentional incompatibilities between their own product lines to force users into doing upgrades of their entire groupsets instead of being able to mix and match. There’s a whole cottage industry of fiddly problem solving parts to work around Shimano’s standards abuse, and a constellation of smaller parts manufacturers has sprung up to provide alternatives. It’s not just individual users eschewing Shimano over this, more and more bike brands have been releasing bikes with groupsets from underdogs like Microshift and Suntour. Also SRAM is still around to eat Shimano’s lunch (Though they’re also guilty of trying the lockin tactic).
Shimano hasn’t done themselves any favors with their obnoxious decades-long habit of engineering intentional incompatibilities between their own product lines to force users into doing upgrades of their entire groupsets instead of being able to mix and match. There’s a whole cottage industry of fiddly problem solving parts to work around Shimano’s standards abuse, and a constellation of smaller parts manufacturers has sprung up to provide alternatives. It’s not just individual users eschewing Shimano over this, more and more bike brands have been releasing bikes with groupsets from underdogs like Microshift and Suntour. Also SRAM is still around to eat Shimano’s lunch (Though they’re also guilty of trying the lockin tactic).