Reccomend a 650b Plus Steel Frame?

[jameso]

Alpinum - I realise being all 'it's variable' is an easy position for me or anyone else to take. It's too easy to talk about bike handling or geometry in vague terms or without quantifying things, there's enough of that around. I know you're smart enough and ride enough to quantify it well. So, you ride a bike and don't like it but it may be great for someone else here - you might help them avoid an expensive mistake but without context it might put them off the perfect bike for them.

Edit to add as it's an interesting point, and sorry OP we're digressing..

All terrain touring shape, progresssive MTB... where's the difference? Perhaps the understanding of comfort and handling are simply old fashioned for some with a touring background and no or little overlap into mountainbiking? Some might need to accept that the long, low, slack works really well not just in steep alpine terrain during short stints.

I'd say the difference is the optimisation for use. Whether our bikes have to be optimised or could have a 'one perfect design' is the Q isn't it.
From what you describe about your fat bike I think our bike tastes might overlap a fair bit. The steeper STA aspect of LLS bikes for longer, more seated MTB/off-road touring riding can be tricky, or at least by the time a STA is steep enough to aid climbing it's putting me out of balance on flatter open trails that make up enough of my riding for it to be influential in comfort. Also found that I missed the light input feel of a short, steeper geometry at times, but that's just pros-cons based on where I ride most. A LLS would be agile enough over bigger terrain and maybe terrain is what a lot of this is about.
I have spent the last year on my gravel bike with an inline post and the saddle slid fwd to approximate a 76 STA with a layback post or +3 degrees over the av road bike. Felt wrong for a while, it's working OK now with some other re-balancing. It's on a custom frame that is already long in the TT so although the general LLS gravel frames I tried before didn't work, this is getting closer to good (imo!) using some of those ideas. I think what makes it all difficult is that a geo change that may be great needs a long time to get used to and adjust around so there's a lot of riding time on a bike that feels wrong at first - and may stay that way, may not.

[Hamish]

Cramped position when sitting and utterly cramped when standing despite a huge seat and head tube.
Nervous handling up front.
Unnecessarily stiff in the rear, yet still quite some lateral movement of the rear wheel, soft in the front and fork. QR surely didn't help.

Yet it's longer reach than my rigid bikepacker MTB and I'm a bit over 6'. It's slacker than my bike by half a degree with a bit less offset. And the stays are about the same length as my bike, a bike which proves that 'life' and chainstay length aren't linked in the way many suggest. It's also QR. And I 'kin love my bike, have done big rides and plenty of technical riding on it. What I'm getting at is it's all so subjective, we can't say one bike is wrong because we prefer something different for our own use.

I'll just lean back and wait 'till more touringbike building traditionalists start using what some - even after 3 - 4 years - still call progressive/modern/aggressive MTB geo. Gravel bikes are going through that transition right now. More touringbikes will surely follow. As is already the case with a few companies (eg QBP brands).

A transition where it will be interesting to see what sticks. I've been riding gravel bikes with those MTB-ish sort of numbers for a fair while but it just wasn't an 'ah-ha!' like the forward geometry influence was on MTBs. Just a pro-con thing. imo/ime geometry can't fix the set of opposing needs and balances with gravel bike range - not in the way that LLS has moved FS + HT MTBs on. I mean, yes we could build an aggro LLS rigid 29er with drop bars and some could call it a gravel bike, I'll just call it an XC 29er with bad bar choice : )

RE 'Progressive' , could call it alternative - progression suggests improvement, it's an improvement in unloaded MTBs yes, for other bikes in some situations sure maybe maybe not. Some builders will move their designs on and some won't. Neither is wrong, the one who's wrong is one who can't justify why they do what they do and hasn't tried the alternatives. There's a lot of 'the new school invalidates the old school' thinking in bike geometry, always has been. Nothing is sacred and equally there's a lot that's been learned and fine-tuned and is there to build on rather than think everything is waiting to be disrupted.

Only this lunch time I was riding a bike with classic bend road bars on, thinking how much more I like them than the compact curve lowers of the last 10 years or more. It's a bit like that line about how as I get older my Dad's taste in music seems so much better

I recon I agree with you on the older vs LLS geometry. I have tried all kinds of bikes except the very very steep seat angles of the very latest HTs. I still find that for all day rides my Pugsley is the most comfortable bike I have ridden. my Troll is OK and the Longitude not bad at all but the Pug is best. If I could find an ECR frame I recon I would build one up with the Rohloff from my Troll.