In reply to Rest Jug:
> Replying to your points:
> 1 - It's totally debatable whether a sustained route is more desirable than a non-sustained one.
I'm just going by the stars in the guidebooks, aka the consensus.
> A big jug you can shake out for some 20 seconds could be enough to break the continuity a bit without feeling like you lowered back to the ground.
Yeah, the odd big jug in a hard route could provide a shake out. There quite often are at the walls I climb in. Not really going to change the indoor climbing experience much.
> 2 - I can see many people climbing lower grades (say, below French 7a RP?) getting frustrated by the fact that they can't convert their indoor training on rock very easily...
No amount of putting big holds into harder routes is going to change this. If you want to get good at climbing anything, then you have to climb that thing. Indoors doesn't help at all with grit, it can be used to gain fitness for trad, and to to gain PE for sport. There is no problem that needs to be solved.
> 3 - Are you aware that some of the world's best competition climbers (i.e. people who have superhuman levels of endurance) such as Ramonet, Mina Markovic and Ondra train endurance exclusively on boulder circuits and climb indoors with a rope very rarely, if ever? Doing circuits is a better way to isolate the endurance aspect of climbing, although it doesn't train you as much mentally because you are not at heights, you don't have to clip etc.
So what. I don't see the point in "but Ondra does..." arguments, it's totally irrelevant to punters down the wall. Practically speaking, circuits are bollox for endurance training because you can only get one person on them at a time - you need a very quiet climbing wall.
> Likewise, the experience of committing, bouldery moves on a run out
Indoor run-out!?!?
> and high up on the wall can't be offered by mere bouldering 2 metres above a soft mat. But that's something that happens often on outdoor routes and that you get no preparation from a climbing gym.
You can't train commitment indoors.
> Again, I'm not advocating for a complete change in style in indoor route setting, but a more equal split between the two antithetical styles.
> I'd love a gym where I can have routes that train my commitment to a relatively easy move for the grade that comes after a long and continuous series of relatively easy moves that made me pumped.
> In the same way, I'd love routes that train my commitment to dial in moves that really are at my limit and from which I might fall not so much because I am pumped, but because the sequence was actually a hard one to pull.
> I tend to agree to those who said that the footwork is different/more difficult outdoors. I believe this is also connected to the desire to have sustained routes. These would tend to have medium sized holds for the grade, which I'd be led to believe tend to be of medium difficulty for hands (even more so if you discount the "pump" element) but really, really easy for feet. Bouldery cruxes on indoor routes might entail smaller-than-average-for-that-grade holds, which might make footwork a bit more of a challenge too.
Once you'd got to the jugs at the end of the crux, that's when your feet would be on the small footholds, so it wouldn't work.
> It can also come down to the choice of holds. There are holds out there which make decent holds for hands but terrible for feet (slopers with a crack that can accommodate fingers but not a feet) which I'd like to see more often indoors.
I just think you're asking too much of indoor climbing. It's crap and boring and nothing like climbing outside and never can be. The subtle changes you suggest might make it more fun for you, but more annoying for someone else. There's no way I'd want to climb an easy route with a boulder problem above a clip at the top, it would just be really annoying and ineffective for training.