[paul80808]

I regularly bike in the rain for 30 minutes or more. My gear is all nylon with a non-PFOA wax coating. It doesn't perform as well, and my jacket will get saturated after about 45 minutes. I deal with that by wearing something under the jacket (usually a fleece). Absolutely worst case, the fleece gets slightly damp but I am still perfectly comfortable for many hours.

The only other issue I see is that I have to reapply the coating about once a year, or after I machine-wash the jacket.

Overall these are very minor inconveniences. I wonder if anyone really needs the performance gains of these chemicals - you only see the advantage in really bad weather conditions over long periods of time. How many people are doing day-long hikes in pouring rain?

[brianwawok]

It’s just laziness. People don’t want to have to reapply stuff. They want it to be waterproof until they throw it out and buy another.

[DoingIsLearning]

This is too dismissive.

How many times have you seen ads for Gore-Tex anything? How many waxed canvas coats are you able to find in normal outdoor shops or in normal clothing retailers?

There is a lot of money in outdoor gear and it is all being spent on pushing high tech solutions.

You basically have to go out of your way to find some grandpa shop or 'out of fashion' clothing (mostly shops selling hunting clothing/gear) to find reasonable alternatives.

[janef0421]

I think it's more that people lack the skill and time to reapply such coatings and there are no commercial services that do so.

[jxramos]

Pearl Izumi rain pants work great for me for heavy rain. I never got a proper upper cover just a hoody jacket cover thing that doesn't do as good a job of keeping water out as the pants. I wear a coat sometimes and needed something to pull over a coat. The rain pants pull over existing pants very readily, the top has a wider variation in thickness I need to cover so I never got a proper rain jacket from Pearl Izumi which is more on the tight end of a fit.