the cat food can thing is perfect here.<p>there are, in fact, TKP trucks on longboards, there are extensive discussions on r/longboarding about the differences, and what it boils down to is that a skateboard is an individualized piece of equipment, and it will work differently with every human being because of the geometry of their legs, feet, ankles, muscles, ligaments, shoes, the kind of riding they do, the type of pavement they ride in, the weather they ride in,whether they do vert skating or "transition" (ramps/bumps), rails, massive jumps, ground tricks, carving, downhill bombs, long distance push, pumping, etc etc, and even the way their mind works in relation to their body.<p>so the amorphous concept of "feel" is, basically, everything on a skateboard. the top end skateboarding engineers like Paul Schmitt ( <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18MRZq0bhpE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18MRZq0bhpE</a> ) will spend endless hours interacting with skateboarders to get continuous feedback about anything from wheel chemistry to changes in board shape. There is another interview there with rider Andy Anderson where he talks about how they shaved part of the sides of his board down in a slight taper so that it would be balanced evenly due to one side being slightly differently shaped than the other. To a casual watching him at the Olympics, you could not even tell which side of this board was front and back let alone if the sides had gotten tapered. That was just one many things he had put into the design of his board, all tailored around the style he wanted to skate (which is a lot of older freestyle like Primo and pogo hops combined with all the newer olympics stuff ).<p>im sure there is some room to innovate trucks but it takes a lot of back and forth with a rider, its not , like the cat food can thing, a single variable optimization.