they also used to bang out great new bikes on a regular basis, so why not now? i could understand it if they still made all the bikes by hand but they don't and can out source to a reputable builder as they do now
You have this the wrong way round, Bill.
It's easy to "to bang out great new bikes on a regular basis" -- weekly, if you're feeling frisky and are of an indecisive frame of mind -- IF you make your own frames on the premises. If you're paying the wages of your designer and brazier anyway, you can take the chance that at least one customer wants a bike like that. The opportunity cost is a few quids' worth of tubes.
However, if your outsource your frames, even locally, you'd better have your mind made, and limit the wastage of bikes that customers don't want, because now you have to sell at least a few handsful of bikes to pay someone else overheads to develop your frame.
And if you outsource to Taiwan, you'd better be certain several hundred customers of precisely the right size will want that new bike, 'cos the factory in Taiwan won't even look at your drawing until you're ready to make a minimum order of a container-load of frames, very likely only one size per container.
At each step, you can make fewer newly designed bikes because the money at risk becomes geometrically higher.
That's just the pressure of the economic reality of mass production.
Besides, it is sound management when you're small manufacturer to identify your niche and exploit it thoroughly, and then to grow into the next-door niche rather than attempt to do something radically different, because the radically different market belongs to someone else, and anyway comes at a higher general risk than the niche next door, whose customers will probably be aware of your reputation.
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Thorn was a small provincial bike shop that transitioned brilliantly into the internet/multinational/online business age. But in the process it was inevitable that it would shed its past as a custom or semi-custom bike maker, and that in the end the product lines would have to be rationalized to protect the ability to offer the Thorn unique selling point (a genuinely capable and proven design, not just a cafe tourer) and of course to reduce wastage. I cringe when I see how often Thorne has a sale of their own frames and bikes, a direct result of the huge number of sizes they stock, combined with the minimum frame order necessary in Taiwan.
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As for the nostalgia trip of derailleurs, there are plenty of custom bike builders who'll build you a traditional road bike or tourer or anything you want, as long as the tubes for it come off the shelf. Bob Jackson builds a very tasty bike and will put all the bling on it you want to pay for.
www.bobjacksoncycles.co.uk But Bob Jackson's is a different kind of provenance from Thorn's provenance. Refer back for what I said about niches.
Someone else wants a stainless bike. Now, I happen to think Reynolds stainless is common, and a very good reason for riding a Thorn is that it isn't common, so if I'm going custom for a stainless bicycle I'd rather have a bike of Potte & Potthoff stainless steel, the Noblex brand. And I know just the guy to build it for you, and who has cornered the tubes too, but you'd better learn to speak German first, because he doesn't speak English. The thing is, Uwe has some proven designs to choose from, and the customer can alter the bike from there. A randonneur with fork (fitted, with a Chris King headset) starts at about £1100, but this will soon elevate if you want bling like polished lugs. Marschall Frameworks
http://www.marschall-framework.de/produkte/I'm not touting for business for these guys -- though they both have fine reputations and are definitely toutable -- but demonstrating how far Thorn has come from the niche it started out in, and how difficult it would be to do what you want it to do, which is to return to that niche.
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I'm sorry to say that what you want, Bill, from a business viewpoint is irrational, an excitement for a few customers, of which very few will put their hands in their pockets, and which will therefore have to be financed out of profits. Compare that with the Thorn which had their brazier on the premises, at the beginning of this post, and financed a new bike design almost wholly out of ongoing, unavoidable overheads.
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While the appearance might be that the economics has nothing to do with Rohloff hub gearboxes, actually the Rohloff is central to the niche that Thorn has carved out. If the Thorn advertising doesn't make the point explicitly, it should, that Thorn was one of the first to adopt the Rolloff and knows a great deal more about it than almost all its competitors. The Rohloff is one of the things that in several ways sets Thorn apart from the other bike makers. I can go into them, but this post is long already, and I'm sure you can list them as easily as I can.
