UKC

With the prevalence of bouldering gyms the art of climbing featuresforfeet is being lost. Can this be blamed for the decline in Trad climbing? 

No.

What decline in Trad climbing?  Decline in number of trad climbers, or routes climbed per year, or number of hard routes climbed? Would be interesting to use log book data to see if any of these have declined.

I don't do huge amounts of sport climbing or bouldering but I gather the deviants that do partake have also been known to use small footholds, perhaps even more so than Trad climbers.

And it's not like indoor features were ever a particularly good simulation of actual outdoor holds. They just limited what range of problems could be set in a specific area.

No. Thankfully modern walls are fantastic, as are the choices of holds, and they don't have rubbish fibreglass features which get in the way of good setting. 

1-There is no decline in Trad Climbing.  

2-Sport climbing & bouldering typically requires much more accurate footwork than the average trad route.

3-'Features for feet' are only seen on crappy old walls. Thankfully we have much better facilities now, with fantastic route setting.

I guess he could mean the decline in average trad grade from HVS in the '90s to MVS now (based on the log boog data in UKC)

features for feet is still done on the Wave at the Foundry, and I don't think this O.G. is 'crappy'

Aren't there feature boulders at walls with features for feet and coloured holds for hands?!

There is one at Mile End Wall and one at The Castle outdoor boulders.

I've seen it.

It is for training above 7b+ sport.

Decline by way of route regrading in rockfax and ukc ever upwards. Installation of dare I say it but peg-bolts so what was once an hvs is now e2 with the Crux secured by an absolutely bomber placement, absence of anyone willing to drop out of society to just climb, and everyone just training on slopers and open-handed holds is possibly the reason that no one can Trad climb anymore without thinking it's 3 grades higher than the first ascentionist did. I mean I don't climb at a very high standard but it's note-able how routes I once found hard have had their teeth removed and also routes that I found easy are suddenly e graded. I put it all down to the Demise of features for feet. I tried features for feet at the bouldering wall tonight and it certainly made everything hard. But there were no features to speak of so ...

But really I don't know why I started this thread. I actually just think that November is rubbish and I haven't been able to go out climbing for absolutely ages.

As I point out every time someone trots out those stats, they're conveniently accessible but probably pretty meaningless.

Firstly, because average grade tells you very little about what people are actually capable of climbing. My average grade from year to year tells you more about who I climbed with that year than my limits.

Secondly, because nobody was logging on UKC as they went along back at the start of your comparison, so very few people will have gone back and exhaustively logged everything. I'd imagine most just went back and logged a subset of routes that stood out for them or that they wanted people to know they'd climbed, which is almost certainly biased towards higher grades.

And finally, because people who are keen enough on climbing to be coming on UKC when it starts up and logging their routes from the 90s are probably not a particularly representative sample of all climbers from the 90s anyway.

I'm sure there are loads of other confounding factors as well. Given all of those complications in the data, HVS to MVS is a pretty small shift to be placing significance on.

I’m not done yet!

That's called smearing