It is when the aluminium in question is an old GT RTS! That said, my main problem is that I can't easily and comfortably swap chainsets across my bikes nowadays (my retro bike being square, whereas my modern stuff is all octalink). My major beef with ISIS is that it didn't need to exist. Let Shimano do their thing, and everyone else just stick to the standard that had worked perfectly well since Orville Wright invented the purple anodised Race Face crank.
Anyway, now that I know that you MTB your strong feelings about ISIS makes more sense.
It's not even a curio in road anymore having so completely fallen out of popular memory.
As for its existence, I'm not unsympathetic to companies creating open standards to try and mitigate Shimano's business practice of (a) creating a technology, (b) patenting it to hell, then (c) leveraging their share of the market to more or less engage in rent seeking behavior, but Octalink doesn't strike me as something that needed to be stopped that way as it was one of those technologies of minimal merit peddled (heh) to bike consumers who buy shit of minimal merit because it's new. And as the sequel to ISIS (BB30) has shown, there's no stomach in the industry for working together on this matter anyway so why bother shitting on consumers like that? There really is something to be said about always being able to find the part you need without having to buy a "new" technology that replaced the perfectly fine one you'd already been using before it broke (Shimano's solution).
