What's lust got to do with it?
Nobody's ever lusted after a VW beetle or a Morris Minor. Are they cool? In the right context, certainly. A Raleigh Twenty is cool in a way that has nothing to do with lust.
I'm not arguing that Raleigh didn't make a lot of very uncool machines, particularly in the later years, but cool per se needn't have anything to do with the perceived desirability of the object. Sometimes quite the reverse.
A Grifter or a Twenty (being just what it set out to be, and no more) is cool in a way that a Max CroMo (trying hard to appear to be something it wasn't) never could be.
Now the RSW16 is a problem bike for me, because it represents part of the uncool side of Raleigh - the ugly business practices post-war that saw countless competitors bought up and closed down. The RSW was a Moulton competitor to sell cheaply to people who didn't understand what a Moulton was about. The end result was the sale of the Moulton brand to Raleigh, paradoxically a brief period where the Mk3 Moulton had far superior build quality to the previous versions, and then the complete suppression of the brand when Raleigh realised they could make more profit per unit selling RSW's and Twenties. That's not cool.
But overall, I'm still voting cool.
