Carbon fiber is a cheap manufacturing process compared to turning things out in metal by casting or machining. Some pimply-faced kid "engineer" who never did anything but watch YouTube and sit at a computer makes something with Autocad or a similar program, the computer controlled machinery can spit out a mold or 3d print a prototype and almost no human labor can start stamping out parts, the only humans could be assembly line workers each adding a bit before the stuff is throw into computer cut and printed boxes, humans may not even have to stack the warehouse or load the trucks, and now they have robot drones to drop things off at peoples homes and robot trucks being tried out on highways.
No thanks, my old bikes have been around from 40 to 85 years already and they will last another five or fifteen years until I am six feet under. If I can not buy a metal bicycle part that has some sort of human art or passion in it formed out of metal, then I am not buying it. The first carbon fiber parts had hand work in them, but they made sure to get rid of that as quickly as they can. I picked up an old Kestrel frame from the late 1980s for cheap and it takes all old standard metal parts that a steel frame would accept, and it was basically hand-made in a small factory in the USA. It does not have a crack in it, but I see all sorts of carbon frames and forks with crack failures now. Everything in Western society seems to get worse and more corrupted as time goes by. I really think the only hope for humanity is if Western society largely collapses and the old pre-industrial Eastern thinking can take over, where art and passion are as or more important than profit.
