Yes. I believe that is a completely reasonable expectation. It requires LOTS more up-front investment and time into long term testing and development, so incremental changes aren't necessary. The refinements of downhill bikes that has been seen in the last decade shouldn't have taken more than a couple generations to achieve in my opinion. Not 6 or 7. With longer generation lifecycles, you can afford to have more inventory of spares laying around, and over a 10 year cycle, it should save money because the R&D wouldn't be as constant and repetitive and the tooling costs would obviously decrease. Seems it would make things better for everyone if someone were to bite that initial bullet.
It's a major dis-service to the customer to not have parts available to keep their expensive toy running for years to come. Having to retire a bike that expensive because there's just no more parts available to keep it running 3 or 4 years later is just insane to me. These bikes are modular and user-serviceable for a reason, and it's absurd that their parent industry can't support that.
Boutique brands are a little different, but with them come some perks. My last bikes have been made by Frank The Welder. If I call him up and need a spare part that he doesn't have...well, he'll fvcking make me one. He's cool like that, and that's why I buy his bikes, among lots of other reasons.
I recently learned why train rails are spaced apart the distance that they are. It made me LOL. It's the comfortable distance between two horses asses. Or the centerline, but from the viewpoint of the person in the coach - the horses ass.
Roads and transport routes were burned in at the distance apart between two horses pulling carriages, and the rails were laid on these existing routes at that spacing, and the vehicles were then designed around that.
Today that dictates how aerospace companies and heavy industrial companies have to make certain structural components for rockets or things like the space shuttle that need to be transported by train. The designers are pounding their heads against the wall trying to size things to fit this seemingly arbitrary cargo width, dictated by the size of a horses ass 100 some odd years ago.
