Also I hate dropping gears in the middle of an intersection.
Maybe it's hopping curbs? Can't be helped here, the roads just aren't designed for bike commuting and everybody has a lifted 3/4 ton they can't fineagle into their garage. It's lovely.
Can't see how that would affect the shifting, but if you are graceless you can beat up the wheels enough to cause them to get out of true. If you have my wheelsets, 32 spoke 3x on HED Belgium Plus rims that I built myself, you can hop curbs all you like. I do, and I ride non-technical dirt too.
As for shifting, I've been riding for 45 years and have never had a problem with manual shifting, from the dark ages 5x2 speed to my current 9x3, 10x2 and 11x2 rides. Frankly I am happily shocked at the precision and durability of my newest bike, the 11x2, given the narrowness of the chain. After 2.5 years of 3x weekly 3000' climbing, including some dirt, riding through the winter, and the drive train is dirty, no missed shifts and no noise. Amazing. I would never have guessed that.
It should not be common for a chain to slip off, something is wrong. The something may just be parts quality.
Derailers are a case of getting what you pay for. The cheapest ones are junk and will never shift well. My partner bought a bottom quality bike with no-name shifters and it has never shifted correctly from day one. It does also drop the chain. No amount of aligning will get it to shift well.
In contrast my 18 years old mountain bike with Shimano XTR derailers has always shifted perfectly and still does.
Bike derailers is one area where it's definitely worth it to go for top of the line components and never worry about it again. Low quality components will make you hate they money you saved every single time you attempt to shift.
I do utility cycling and long distance tour cycling.
Band-drive systems with internal hubs are superior for commuters who need reliability over anything else.
Tubeless tires are now the standard for riding on irregular terrain.
Disc-brakes are not the standard for hilly areas or people who ride at high speeds.
Meanwhile, single chain-drive fixed/free gear bikes are still perfectly serviceable for most use cases (even if you need to select from a few different cog sizes to fit your area).
The reason why "chain drive and pneumatic tires are the gold standard" is that most people don't ride bikes. If people did, you'd see much, much more variation in technology on the street, as they would be used for functional purposes, rather than recreational purposes.
Off road cycling is its own beast, with the development of specialized bikes for that use, and also the design of trails that challenge both your skill and your technology. But the old footpath through the woods, or gravel road, is still the same as it ever was, and a regular bike handles it just fine.
In the US, there's a perpetual effort by the bike companies to get people out riding, when everybody's already got a nearly brand new bike hanging in the garage. They want to sell new bikes, so of course the silver bullet is new technology. I think the rapid adoption of e-bikes shows that the real barrier was not the detailed performance of particular components, but physical effort. Who knew?
Is there data on this rapid adoption? I'm not seeing it. It's hard to believe riding a bike is so much effort, but who knows?
In a lot of cases I think it might be less about effort itself, and more about climate and what the level of effort means in that context. I know where I live half the year the average temperature is 80F or above, and pedaling or not could very well be the difference of showing up as a sweaty mess that needs a shower on site to appear presentable or not.
Both enclosed chain cases and internal hub gears have been around over 100yrs though, almost from the beginning of bicycles.
Surprised it took so long for tubeless tires and disc brakes to become popular on bicycles since they've been used on motorcycles and cars for many decades. Otherwise the "gold standard" fancy bikes still exist and still look closer to a bike from 1900 than most bikes on shelf do.
[0]https://www.sheldonbrown.com/gloss_ba-n.html#belt [1]https://www.sheldonbrown.com/gloss_g.html#gearcase
* Tension method of spoking: Invented by Eugene Meyer in Paris in 1869.
* Tangential spokes: If you look closely at bicycles, the spokes are tangential to the hub, not radial. The tangent-tension combination (and maybe tangential spokes independently) were patented by James Starley in 1874. The "spokes are placed so as to be tangential to the hub in both the forward and the backward direction, thus forming a series of triangles that brace the wheel against torque during either acceleration or braking." [0]
The improved spokes were introduced before chains and gears, allowing larger wheels. Larger wheels served as a subsitute for gearing, increasing the ratio between linear distance traveled and one rotation of a pedal, and thus the big-wheeled 'penny-farthing' or 'ordinary' bicycles were born.
However, knowing the history, I haven't yet grasped the mechanics of how tension and tangents benefitted wheels, beyond general concepts. Does anyone know a good technical source (not Wikipedia)?
[0] "Bicycle Technology" by SS Wilson (Stewart Wilson, afaik) in Scientific American (March 1973)