[schoen]

Sorry, I didn't realize that you had understood that and were talking specifically about hydraulic maintenance. I have bikes with cable-actuated brakes and also one bike with a hydraulic system, and I've done maintenance myself on the former but not the latter. I personally think of the cable version as comprehensible and maintainable and the hydraulic version as black magic; hopefully that will change intentionally. I was imagining that other people would probably feel the same way about hydraulic brakes ("great, but hard to understand and totally infeasible to maintain at home"); my apologies for misunderstanding your point!

[midoridensha]

No worries! Have you worked on car brakes before? Bike brakes aren't any more "black magic" than those, though again I will say they're more fiddly in my experience, because getting all the air bubbles out can be a pain sometimes. I've bled countless car brakes and it was always fairly easy with a helper to pump the pedal, but my experience with my 2 bikes has been more troublesome. I'm not sure what the problem is, considering cars have rather complex systems with multiple master cylinder reservoirs (2, for redundancy), 180 or 360-degree bends in the brakes lines, and now ABS systems, but getting all the air bubbles out of my bike systems turned out to be a bit of a black art, and it differs by caliper position (front vs rear) and hardware mfgr. The $20 brake bleed kits on Amazon are pretty good though, including all the stuff you'll need.

The nice thing about hydraulics is that, once they're set up, they're good until you need to change the pads usually, and even then the fluid is probably fine unless it's old. Rim brakes, on the other hand, need constant adjustment and fiddling just to keep them from rubbing, as the pads wear. I don't miss them one bit.

[Karrot_Kream]

The fiddliness of bleeding a hydraulic brake line is exactly why I stick with cable actuated disk brakes on my bike hah. And even if the front wheel gets knocked out of the brake a bit it's trivial to go home, put it on the stand, and move the wheel around.

Hydraulic brakes are definitely fun but my bike is a compromise between low effort and utility. I'm running a 2x right now and running a barend shifter up front because my height and bike geometry means I often knock the front derailleur cable out of place. I should probably just switch to a 1x at this point.