nanaejt wrote:I'm also interested as to why this is not a good $200 bike
Because it will fall apart, spectacularly, if ridden hard.
The kinds of people who want a bike but only want to pay $200 for it are, generally, not the kind of people who are capable of the upkeep and maintenance required to safely keep a $200 bike rideable.
For starters: road bikes are not "one size fits all." In order to be able to ride at any level of comfort, you need to have the distance between saddle and pedal to within a few mm of optimal. You need to have a saddle that fits your "sit bones." You need to have a stem that puts the hoods of the brake levers right where you comfortably can reach them. You need spacers to place the handlebars at a comfortable height above the headset. Shops will help you swap parts out to properly fit you to your bike, because they want you to actually use the damn thing and come in for consumables and because it's a point of professional pride. This bike offers almost no adjustability of fit and in this thread you have people from 5'3 to 5'9 clamoring to ask if this bike fits them -- the answer is almost guaranteed to be "no" for this thing stock, unless they happen to be a perfect match for the random body Dorel decided would ride this.
So okay, you buy it and it fits you like a glove somehow. At a minimum, you'll need to replace the wheels right quick. 24 spokes isn't always terrible -- and race wheels have fewer -- but *these* 24-spoke wheels are. Instead of making a higher quality wheel that can stay true with only 24 spokes, they just make the rims heavier and increase spoke tension, and when they go out of true they're even harder to get back to true. So there's $150-ish right there.
Otherwise, when the wheels go out of true, you'll have to loosen the brakes enough to make an entire revolution without the bent rim rubbing the pads. And looser brakes = less stopping power.
You'll probably feel that if you're buying new wheels, you might as well replace the cassette on the back (if you're lucky and they aren't using a 7-speed freewheel, in which case, you'll be replacing the rear wheel as soon as you hit a bump and the rear axle breaks).
Hell, maybe your replacement wheelset comes with a cassette. Almost nobody makes 7-speed cassettes anymore, and those that exist are geared for mountain bikes (huge range between the gears, larger biggest-gear). So you think about maybe putting an 8- or 9-speed on it to get a bit smaller of a jump between gears, and suddenly you need a new rear shifter. So you look and you can't find indexed stem shifters, so instead you're using salt water old tech, buying indexed bar-end shifters ($40-$90) or STI levers ($80-$100ish).
For $350 or so, you can buy a used bike or even some new bikes from an LBS that actually cares about their customer base, work with them to fit it to you, and have people who will back you on any issues you may have and keep you safe and riding happily.
That's why this bike for $200 is a stupid idea. If you're going to get a department store level piece of trash, get it in a mountain bike style. At least then you'll be able to "fit it" to almost meet your needs by raising your seat and handlebars.
