Other’s opinions: Indoor workouts and Smart Trainer (Ant+ FE-C).

Until recently, I’ve run indoor workouts with a smart trainer using TrainerRoad. I’m a big fan of doing most workouts in ERG mode. However it was always very nice to be able to on the fly switch out of ERG into manual mode (I think TR calls it Standard, but may be wrong) whenever either 1) just not having a great day and need to take a few seconds or minutes to spin easy and recover before resuming, or 2) on workouts with real high intense, short burst intervals (e.g. anything 30 secs or less). Recently our local grassroots race team has started working with a coach and workouts are entered into the Training Peaks platform. So I decided to push the workouts to the Karoo (I’m using new K3) to do my indoor workouts that way. Recently when running a workout, I figured toggling off ERG to Read Only would essentially go into a manual mode where your power output is determined by your gear choice and cadence…just like riding outdoors. But what happens is the trainer stays locked at the target power apparently until some other source (e.g. maybe running Zwift off another device in parallel). So if the other source sends a signal for a different power target, then the Karoo just records the data accordingly as the other source is controlling the smart trainer. I actually contacted support, and they verified that this is how it is supposed to function. My question to the community I guess is this: does anyone find any value in that functionality? I suppose someone could be running a workout natively on the Karoo, and has an appointment at a specific time to join a group on a Zwift ride at a certain time and would switch over to Read Only on the Karoo? But in that example, why wouldn’t you just use Zwift from the very start? Why would you want to in the middle of a ride toggle between two separate sources. Seems like such a hassle and unnecessary. I would rather have similar functionality as what I described above with TrainerRoad. Now I will say support has always been great and very responsive when I’ve had previous issues or questions (I reported issues with average power calculations when my crappy power meter would have drops…Hammerhead ultimately said it was a bug that was even bigger than this specific issue and also occurred when you stop spinning altogether. They fixed in a software update a few weeks later). The support person did indicate they were submitting a feature request for consideration for future enhancements to truly be able to toggle between ERG and a manual mode. So Kudos to them for listening. I’m just still baffled, however, with the currently functionality. Maybe I’m on an island and others like the current capability?