I'm sure it is a great piece of kit but if you actually want it then you may have evil geoblocking to contend with too.
Has to knock it down a rung or two of the drivetrain totem pole.
- If Eagle has 50T then Shimano has to have 51T.
- Back at the SRAM marketing lair, a 52T cassette was hastily cobbled up to keep up with the teeth arms race.
- Meanwhile the customer was fine with 46T but, strangely and utterly predictably, no one actually asked that key question.
- A large bag of freshly cooked dicks was opened.
I thought similar, but the 51T isn't the cassette arms race / dick measuring competition that it appears to be. It's actually so the cassette has an even jump between the higher gears (even 6T spread between the top 4 gears, full range replicated below for fellow sad people to obsess over)*
It would (probably) give it an edge in smoothness over Eagle (8T jump to lowest gear) and 11-46 XT (9T jump). Even Sram admit they kinda discovered 12 speed by accident during routine R&D and decided to jam the biggest pizza tray they could find on it for the lowest gear so they could claim 9000% gear range** so the more even spread of Shimano's 12 speed gear certainly
looks like it would work better.
Having said all that if Shimano is pulling some favoritism garbage and excluding venerable genius factories like Hope and Chris King from using their stupid Microspline then my money will go to Sram until the end of time.
*(10-
12-14-16-18-21-24-28-33-39-45-51)
**possibly paraphrasing