It seems totally wrong to me to have offroad bikes with seat heights so tall the rider has difficulty to reach the ground. To have a bike so heavy you cant pick it up. To have a bike that for practically any breakdown you need to phone for a tow truck back to the main dealers for repair.
All the old Brit bikes had low seats, low centre of gravity and were practical transport. They also handled well. They suited their environment of the time.
Nowadays bikes are consumer 'white goods' they are meant to be thrown away when they fail, you wont find many working vintage post 1990 bikes when they are that old, they will have been recycled into coke cans.
Why the change ? Mainly marketing hype, and it is the riders who pay.
EFI and engine management is done mostly for marketing, as is the huge horse power that these technologies allow. Seriously, how fast can you ride legally? In the UK there are so many cameras about that you wont keep your licence long if you habitually exceed 80mph. That takes less than 25hp.
I note with interest that Ted Simon fixed his Triumph when he broke a piston in Egypt and carried on to South Africa to get it repaired in a dealers. Yet the LWR team had to abandon one of their BMWs (despite having factory trained technicians witha van load of spares) for brake fault. So a broken piston on an old Triumph is less hassle than an electrical fault on a BMW. And most other 'modern, never go wrong, but scrap it if it does' bike. Do not give me the argumentthat they need EFI for emission control, it simply is not so. EFI is needed where you want to extract maximum power, but that is not 'needed' for touring. Enfields new lean burn engine meets and exceed the Indian (most strict) EEU and USA regulations, so if they can do it I am sure the Germans and Japanese could figure out how also. Maybe atthe same time improve their mpg to something like teh Enfields 75-100mpg. no need for 43 liter tank then.
Look at BMW. When they went from Carbs to EFI the power jumped up from 60 to 100+bhp. The mpg if anything dropped. But who really needs more than 60hp for touring. Of course if you into a competitive sport where you need all thh power you can get, then EFI is the answer, but having to pay many £100's for a black box instead of £2.50 for set of points is a charge too high in my opinion.
The high seat heights are mostly a result of the switch to wet sump engines (cheaper to manufacture) which allows the manufacturers to put all the works (engine, gears and clutch into one casting ) cheaper to manufacture, it also totally negates ALL the improvements brought about by modern oils, as the engine contaminates the gear oil and the gears chew up the engine oil. (shared same oil). This is why cars get 10k miles out of engine oils, and more than double that out of gear oil. Basically we are being sold a lie. So whats new? Perhaps saddam hid all his weapons of mass deception in all those little black boxes for which we have paid so dearly?