All

To be fair Dale was an engineer at Norco, so not quite just a youtuber. However, not properly bedding in the brake pads and not bleeding the rear brake after cutting the line and losing fluid made me skeptical about the rest of the review. Though trying to quantify the lever force with the water bottle test was cool to see- cant really think of any publications/reviewers that will do anything to test (outside of riding, which is always subjective anyways) rather than just saying they are skeptical about marketing jargon.

Pretty brutal review of the Mavens. I saw other reviews that mentioned the lever pull, but not to this extent.

The notion that it’s ok for MTB brakes to require high input forces because F1 does is pretty ridiculous.

the thing that out of the box you have to cycle the pistons is ridiculous to be kind

The way he tested these is how 90% of consumers will use them. Grab bike from LBS or online shipping box... go ride without even as much as checking bolts. Most people aren't very mechanically inclined or don't have time/interest to think about this stuff. The question I have is will they eventually "break in" after a handful of hard rides even if the setup process was inevitably skipped (assuming that's the actual issue at hand).