This intuitive retrieve issue is most pronounced in higher performance situations. Obviously, in a light trout outfit that rarely sees the whole line and backing flying off the reel behind a small stream brook trout, this deficit is diminished. Many of these reel's features are attractive as I said above...I simply bemoan the spools aspect ratios. I am quoting from myself about this wide-shallow design feature from a post last year:
"Last week my wife and I enjoyed our annual adventure to a bonefish lodge in a remote, out-island Bahamian locale. Upon our arrival, there was but one other guest in camp, a tall, athletic, very hard core young (30's) man from Colorado. He had been bonefishing on another more southerly island with a friend and when the friend needed to return to the States, he ventured to this camp, on the doorstep of a spectacular fishery, on his own for two more weeks of pedal-to-the-metal fishing. We were pleased to meet this charming fellow flats fanatic who tied beautiful, imaginative flies and gave serious consideration to all his equipment. He was particularly enamored of his ultimate in light weight brace of rods. On the front porch rod rack he had a Helios #7 & 8 each mounted with a Waterworks reel loaded with gelspun backing to provide adequate capacity on their shallow/wide spools behind tropical floating lines. Picking up the 8-weight really felt impressively like holding a 6. He had caught dozens of bonefish on these rigs and was very enthusiastic. On the last day of his epic trip his skiff and ours arrived back at our home dock simultaneously and, as we slowly motored in, he held aloft a handful of broken rod sections. He had landed several fish and then, battling a particularly good one and regaining line, something happened. Focusing on the fish he had neglected to pay enough attention to the uniformity of distribution of the re-spooling line and, as it is prone to in wider/shallow designs, line built up unevenly to one side and jammed against the reel frame pillar. This is common and the usual result is a fish swimming off with a fly with tippet trailing behind it embedded in its jaw. In this more extreme case, the angler tied good knots and used strong fluorocarbon material and rather than knot failure, experienced catastrophic rod failure...the abrupt reel lock-up caused by the line jam made the rod break in two places, mid and upper butt section simultaneously. "
I strongly feel though that even in a 4-weight outfit where compromise in a reel's design may rarely be revealed, I don't wish to reward a designers work that I consider to er on the engineering over angling attributes. Particularly when there are better designed, equally light weight alternatives like the Hardy U DD and the Nautilus FWX which not only are more angling friendly but feature larger, smarter surface area drag assemblies as well.
