Trivial details, but Doug's LiteSpeed triple was Campy, her current Ti bike is DuraAce (double)
I found compact cranks required getting used to in 2 main areas. First, it's easy to cross-chain which you point out. Second, the jumps between gears is bigger resulting in loss of ability to fine tune the right gearing combination and I really miss having a perfect gear combination. Both of these situations are compounded with the larger rear cassetts.
Not sure I agree. Compact gears are 50-34. Classic road crank is 54-39. Net gear differences are 16 and 15, which is pretty close. I find that I just ride the 34 whenever I'm mostly below 17mph and the 50 whenever I expect to stay above 10mph. The gap when changing the crank is actually less if you have a larger spread between cassette gears. As an interesting sidelight, see Sheldon Brown's "Gear Calculator" at
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/gears/ for speeds at various RPM's and percentage changes between gears.
However, if you do not change the size of the chain, it's somewhat easy to change out the rear cassett to the best match depending on where you are going to ride. An option would be to have 2 rear wheels each with a dedicated cassett. The rear derailluer does not have to be readjusted as the widths are the same. The best of two worlds in one groupo!
Yes, I do have the older cassette on another wheel, but don't expect to need it. And "over analyzing" this stuff is a lot of pleasure in and of itself. Ask Lynn, it's a character trait if not a character flaw.
You could, if you wanted, do the same thing with 9 speed. I believe current Shimano mountain bike 9-speed cassettes are compatible with 9 speed road groups.
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