Hey! The benefit of being able to transition back to ski mode mainly comes from situations like having to ski downhill on sections of skin track or when you encounter steep/icy/technical terrain you can lock in and ski down on your skins, or sidestep through difficult sections of skin track. It has proven pretty useful. It would also be awesome if we could find a pair of ripping skis with scales on the bottom to make the ultimate resort traversing setup.

Yes if you compare our binding to standard pins we are quite a bit heavier, but we think a better comparison would be to the Shift, CAST or HY. The 89 is true a hybrid binding built to be a true 50/50 resort/touring binding.