Larry (and Hackler) -
The "old" Rio Grand was my favorite line for years, and I have many of them. I liked them much better than the Mastery GPX from SA, but unfortunately Rio has changed the weighting on the Grands. They used to be a half weight heavier, which was great for faster rods. Now they've changed it to a full line weight heavier, which I think is ridiculous. Obviously, weighting up by a half weight is difficult to do under normal circumstances, making lines like the old-design Grand and the GPX very beneficial. By contrast, going up a full weight is easy to do. While you might need to make some decisions in terms of tapers, if you wanted a 6 weight for your 5 weight, you'd just, gee, let me see, buy a 6 weight line. I fail to see the novel benefit of buying a 5 weight Rio Grand now in order to get the grain weight of a 6 weight, which I can obviously do by any number of other means. When it was the grain weight of a 5 1/2 weight, that was a much different (and better, in my opinion) story. Maybe somebody with knowledge of the logic can convince me otherwise, but I think the new weighting is idiotic.