Jerry -
I certainly don't mind your post. Personally my views are probably somewhere in between yours and the OP's. Street protective gear may minimize some injuries, but other than a helmet it's going to be a very rare crash where any other gear made the difference between life or death. Or even very severe injuries and minimal injuries. Yes, I get the fact that knee protection & shoulder protection & ankle protection and all of those things are good things, and personally I wear all of it the vast majority of the time I'm on the bike. But if I come across riders who are wearing less than that, I just don't care that much to crusade for them to wear head-to-toe protective gear. It's their own choice, and they are the ones who will have to suffer the potential consequences. As you state, the fact is that nothing they wear will fully protect them from serious injury or worse, so to minimize injuries step 1 is to sell the bike, and a close 2nd is to actually concentrate on riding the bike well enough to avoid all but the most unavoidable crashes.
When a fellow rider crashes, I'm very happy if they were wearing appropriate gear to minimize their injuries, and even more than that I'm just happy if their injuries aren't too severe. If a fellow rider crashes and has a whole bunch of injuries that may have been minimized by gear yet they chose not to buy it / wear it, I'm still happy their injuries aren't worse, but I tend to have a little less sympathy. Especially if it's a single-bike crash that was likely avoidable, as in that case they've screwed up twice in a very short time period. Poor riding and poor gear choices, all in one fell swoop.
I guess if you had a 4 box matrix with the categories being:
Skilled Rider/Poor rider
Above-average safety gear/Poor safety gear
I'd feel much more comfortable riding with the folks in the skilled rider side of the matrix, regardless of gear, even to the extent that a skilled rider with poor safety gear is in my mind a safer bet than a poor rider with above-average safety gear. Now for the schmoes who can't ride and also ride with minimal or no gear, well their choices will catch up with them sooner rather than later no matter what we try and do, so why stress?
