Having had a decent amount of ride time on the Orbea Muga 10, I'm sold on the automatic gearing! It's just so nice moving about. As I had assumed, the most problematic is the transition from flat to very steep. It's like when you forget to downshift on a derailleur bike. To cope with this I've ordered a controller which lets you either a) in auto mode, increase or decrease the preset cadence, or b) shift between virtual gears. Temporarily increasing the cadence will probably work well when entering a steep incline.I completely missed the existence of the Muga 10. I think we are seeing a new category emerge with these bikes: Mobility-EMTB.
Waiting for the TM-B or a bike with an e-CVT motor just got a little easier