Most Jeep by-products start small and grow to immense proportions, rendering them unaffordable and useless on the typical narrow trail. Narrow track CJs evolved into unaffordable JK behemoths, replete with options deluxe and street-hugging compromises.
I agree with you to a point. The thing is, for the combination of wheeling that I do and daily-driver use, a 2-door JK with more cargo room than the current one has would get me pretty close to where the XJ is now. Having had to back a 4-door JK a quarter-mile down a blocked trail to find space to turn it around due to its length, that model holds no interest for me. The extra 4 inches of width over an XJ... Narrower is better, but I could get used to it.
The reality is that if I were just going for something that was a trail-only vehicle, I'd just get an XJ, YJ, or TJ and build that to suit. But for something that's a DD/WW, losing the things that make it liveable for 90% of the situations it's subjected to just isn't something I'm interested in. This is what I was getting at when I said that capability and convenience shouldn't be mutually-exclusive, and touches on one of my major gripes with how Chrysler has made options available across the range: getting feature
x means taking package
y, which isn't suitable for everyone. They need to get back to having wide mix & match of options across the range for customers who need it.
I believe the utility value of the XJ is in stark contast to the JK,
I'd argue that it's a different kind of utility, and that that utility is subjective based on the end user's needs and wants. As the current JK range stands, there's nothing to attract me to it over an XJ, but with the right tweaks to the lineup I could start to see the point
if I needed to replace the XJ. Can't really speak as to why someone else would or would not buy one, though.
and now the Pickup-Nongrata featured in that article. If that nontruck is ever fielded as depicted, it will start life too large to be a suitable XJ replacement. After a few years, you can be assured they will add doors and other features to restoke the market and continue the initilal buying frenzy, further reducing its affordability and attainability.
I'm not saying that TruckJ is undesireable, but I don't think it is a suitable XJ replacement based on its size, cost, and potential growth. It is more likely to be parked alongside a stock JK at the local Nordstrom.
*Shrug* that remains to be seen, but I take your point.
