In general, when I find myself tempted to complain about a lack of responses, I try to remember that this says more about me than it does about my viewing audience.

I got curious, so I checked the five or six threads which follow this one on my feed. Ignoring multi-page threads (because I want to make it easy on myself), all have about 40 times as many views as responses. In counting, I ignored responses from the originators of each thread.

At the moment this one has 166 views and 4 responses not the OP, one of which doesn't relate at all to the original query. So the response rate has actually gone DOWN since OP's complaint, which perhaps means something about perceptions vs. realities. Interesting? Well, maybe only to me. In any case, this thread is pretty normal, and it has been from the start.

Again in general, I figure that if I post something which doesn't elicit responses it means that either no one but me is interested (often true), or people are interested but don't know the answer. Personally, I fall into the latter category on this topic, so I've been viewing without posting. I'd find a 5 kilo/11 lb maximum very limiting, since I carry far more than that in my hard cases; I can only assume that these stated maximums don't really correspond to the inherent limits of the gear itself. I can't imagine the circumstances under which I'd set off on a long trip with only 10 kilos/22 lbs. in my panniers. Nor can I imagine actually paying the listed prices for most soft panniers in order to carry so little weight.

Hope that's helpful.

Mark