Seriously though, why on Earth did they design the twist shifter with cables entering the shifter at 90 degree angle? Why not design them to enter from the side, so that your cables run nicely along the bars without bends and loops (like all other derailleur shifters are made)? Herr Rohloff’s logic evades me on this one.
Rohloff originally expected the main market to be MTB users who wanted an alternative to a relatively fragile derailleur system and didn't anticipate users having bars with a high angle of sweep-back.
Specifically, Bernd Rohloff was a mudracer, whatever they call them in Germany, whose bikes have relatively narrow straight handlebars from which the cables with a slight sideways movement reach a downward sloping top tube and from there has just about a straight run to curl into the gearbox from behind. Besides the relatively straight run, the right-handed exit of the cables offers them some protection between the handbar and the head tube until they reach the top tube. In short, the rotary control exit was designed like that for good engineering reasons -- to a mudplugger; those cables were never intended to have forward extension and exposure as on most other bikes, where cables in luggage space are a nuisance.
I'm sure that if Herr Rohloff envisioned tourers taking up his agricultural gearbox, he would have made it more sophisticated, smoother, lighter (that's the worst possibility!) inevitably more fragile. Let me be the first to say that I view that prospect with horror, and celebrate his lack of marketing vision. I have a bike from the baukast who first took up the Rohloff for touring bikes, Utopia-velo, who're known as the Rolls-Royce of Bikes for many good reasons -- and the Rohloff passes their standard of refinement with very, very little margin to spare, but a huge margin -- multiples! --over any other box in reliability and longevity. I also celebrate Utopia having the vision and the daring -- they make cross-frame bikes of types that didn't survive WW2, so nobody tells them which drummer they should march to -- to take up the then-unproven Rohloff.
