All

It's totally fine and understandable to ask if the bike suits what you - its a reasonable question that only becomes an issue when other start complaining that Santa Cruz didn't design their bike especially for them. You can be disappointed, but it needs some perspective too

Guys I think you are reaching too far in to this - VPP was never any better or worse than other links out there, but the new layout makes a lot of sense from a packaging perspective so there are many legitimate reasons for the change. Also no disrespect to GT, but they haven't had a massive impact for a while as far as I can tell, but SC has plenty of good resources of their own - there is no reason they would be looking to GT for ideas

They may have used that GT as an inspiration, but to make geometry changes, add downtube storage, and any other change means that there was still considerable costs incurred...

I recently read an article by the enduro mag. They made a survey and found out that 70% of their readers that took part in the survey never changed their rebound from what the bike came with. The amount of people riding bikes that dont have a clue about basic setup is very high. For them, something like the progression rate is not relevant. We are all so far off the average user that we are not who brands have to engineer their bikes for. https://enduro-mtb.com/performance-gap-das-dilemma-moderner-bikes/

Probably refers to the fact that Jay, the owner, now lives in Taiwan and does the QC on site. Keith, the designer/engineer is from Scotland and rest of the crew is in the USA. If that makes it a Taiwanese company so be it... The fact that whole brand is basically run by 4 people is just amazing, is FW still run by just Neko and his brother or are there others (not counting the team)?

Probably a thing from Rulezman in Italy, https://www.rulezman.com/zerobackv2/

If we didn't overreact on the internet, does the product even exist? It's our version of "if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" 🤣

Jeff Kendalweed said the Santa Cruz rep brought volume reducers for him but he was happy with whatever’s in there stock, so I wouldn’t assume Santa Cruz fucked up until we get some more reviews/users actually saying they have issues. The price does make the bike a hard sell when there are so many cheaper 4 bar bikes that ride really well.

Wheel size looks the same as the other Tallboy, so I bet they just didn't take the sticker covering the name of the bike off.

@CascadeComponents right now...

It looks like a bicycle

I test rode a tallboy 6 over the weekend (5mi / 600' vert). It is really, really good. I have a ht4 that I love and I love vpp for longer travel bikes. I don't miss it on the new tallboy in the slightest. It goes uphill as well as the previous version with more traction when climbing square ledges and loose over hard... and goes downhill easily 30% better then the previous version. It is half way in between the tallboy 5 and my hightower 4 with regards to descending. Honestly, it's so good and so well rounded that...

I dunno, I work for a company that sells multiple brands that compete with each other on paper but have a different customer base in reality. In a similar industry. Brand differentiation works just fine if you offer a similar product that's marketed differently. Not that I think SC or GT share much at all, or ever made similar products.

99.5% of people looking for a GT or SC would have absolutely no fucking clue what Pon is lol. GT disappeared because all they had was their heritage, and that's not enough to carry a brand indefinitely as they pumped out mostly unappealing bikes year after year. I personally don't know anyone that considered buying one in recent memory. I had a GT bmx in 2006 and really liked it, so when I got properly into mountain biking I always looked at GT. Other options were always better. I stopped looking at them years ago. If GT was successful then...