I've ridden several and we are comfortable on them for the most part. We won't be buying new, just too expensive and any rental would probably be a new one and not a good comp of what we can afford. I'm very comfortable with carburetors having owned possibly 30 BMW Airheads so the carbed bikes are fine with me. I'm looking for specific advice on the early (Magneti-Morelli?) vs the late (Delphi?) Harley FI systems and the Evo vs the TC engines up to 2005ish.
spdrun, not knocking anyone's personal preferences but how do we go from someone asking for some pretty specific advice on a Harley bagger to a recommendation of a V-Strom?
True, there's lots of good choices out there for touring bikes and I've done a bit of adventure touring on a BMW R100GS also but for this one we've pretty well narrowed it down to the choices I mentioned above.