I ride 42 x 10-42 on my daily driver. It's a gravel bike with relatively steep geometry, two sets of wheels, one with 28mm slicks and the other with 33mm knobbies. I occasionally feel like I'm missing the perfect gear for some climbs but hardly ever spin out on the way down. I have a relatively high cadence though, 95-120 rpm typically, but I'm good to 36mph without ever feeling like I'm massively spinning out.
I used to run 11- 28, 53/39 on my road bike.
I ride a Bish Bash Bosh, which we no longer make. Groupset is sram Force 1x hydraulic, with xx1 cassette and absolute black 42 oval front ring.
And IME older groupsets are more reliable that the latest efforts.
Reminds me of the late and unlamented Isis bottom brackets of 10-15 years ago. They were supposed to be better than the outgoing Shimano sealed BBs, you needed a (different, of course) special tool to release them, they were more expensive, the bearings were smaller and they didn’t last as long. I can’t remember whether I managed to swap the BB alone there or whether I ended up changing the spider too. Cue lots of fiddling about in the bits box while I selected 4-spoke versus spiders, chainwheels and piles of everything else.Dub is just smaller bearings that can be made to fit almost any bb shell. A really bad idea.
I'm interested in this comment - could you expand? Do extra speeds mean less reliability (it would seem somewhat intuitive since tolerances will be less). Are 11 spd groupsets worse than 10 spd ?
10 speed was the best for me, sram red and dura ace were the best groups they made, 11 and 12 speed feel too delicate, less positive.