Meet me in the middle

Bikes are so much fun, and you could easily want to just have a thousand bikes. But that's irresponsible, so you buy N bikes, with ever the desire to have N+1.

However, the very nature of cycling and trade-offs means that a stable of N bikes is often unstable when adding another bike!

Suppose you are determined to have a single bike. You might pick a cross country mountain bike or a gravel bike - both can do everything pretty well, but suffer at the extreme ends of the spectrum. An XC race bike will be faster than a downhill bike on pavement, but will be left in the dust compared to road bikes. A gravel bike will do better than a road bike on mountain bike trails, but still can't keep up with a real mountain bike. You like mountain biking more than road biking, so you get an XC race bike. Neat! It's perfect for XC riding, does good on gravel and trail, and OK on pavement. It's not as burly as you might like, but the compromise is worth it considering the gravel and pavement speed boosts.

So you've picked your "do it all" bike, and then you get the opportunity to expand your stable. You buy a road bike. Your pavement riding is perfect, XC riding is perfect, and gravel/trail/downhill are all OK. But this is actually not good. You like trail riding more than XC riding, and it's a toss-up which of the road and XC bike you want to take for gravel riding. You've got a bike that's perfect, but not in the way you care about.

This predicament suggests that you should buy bikes that do what you like best, rather than a compromise between things that work okay for everything. Yes, this means you won't be able to do some rides well - your FS trail bike won't keep up with your friends on the roadie rides. But it means you'll have more fun doing what you like most, and when you buy a new bike, you won't have to reshuffle your whole collection.

I love bikepacking. It's my favorite thing. My initial stable was a gravel bike and a drop bar fat bike. Both were fine for bikepacking, but it wasn't what they were specialized in. When I bought a Salsa Cutthroat, I no longer wanted the gravel bike or the fat bike. The gravel bike was a mediocre road and commuter bike, and the drop bar fat bike was now only great in the snow - it was a toss up if I wanted the fat bike or the Cutthroat for mountain biking.

So now I've stabilized on a commuter/paved-touring-bike, the Cutthroat for bikepacking/gravel/etc, and a hardtail mountain bike. All of them are great for touring or bikepacking. The Cutthroat with road wheels is fast enough for road rides, and everything else is great for what it does.

If I were starting over, I'd probably go for a Salsa Fargo as my first bike. It's a fine commuter, it's a great bikepacking bike, and with a squish fork and plus tires, it'd make a decent mountain bike. I could easily buy another bike to displace some of the responsibilities of the Fargo.