LOL, I doubt that anyone here is laboring under the impression that the manufacturers give a crap about how we feel about de-gunking our rear wheel, or adjusting the rear wheel after a wheel change. I imagine a driving reason for the Yamaha engineers to put a shaft drive on the S10 very much was about money, in that it was a marketing decision; the GS had one, and that was the bike that the S10 was supposed be be a cost effective alternative to. Advertising for the S10 could then tailor itself along the lines of "hey, look....our bike has all the bells and whistles that the GS has, only we offer it at a much cheaper price AND with the traditional Yamaha reliability". Yamaha obviously wasn't concerned in this case about the costs of a shaft drive over a chain, because they hoped that the particular market they were aiming for would easily accept the added cost. Otherwise they'd have just stuck a chain drive on it like most of the other bikes in the Yamaha line, and it would have been looked at more as a competitor to the DL1000 rather than the GS. In this particular case, Yamaha probably thought that a shaft drive was indeed worth the added cost of manufacture, if it allowed them to draw potential buyers away from BMW. Yamaha might not care about dirty back wheels, but they no doubt did care about cracking into a market that was eluding them.
