Robust sucks when you have to load a 10 year old dog in the truck, because he/she can't do it on their own anymore.
I'm a LOT more partial to this build as of right now. 40 lbs of firecracker. The heavy feathers look good in a show ring, they look bad at the end of a day of working fencerows with heavy cockleburr growth.
This pooch is tethered to a 70lb bike that 200lbs of me is about to climb on. She will pull it either 5 or 6 miles, depending on my route. She will do that three or four times, pretty much every day that the road isn't slick.
The robust setters aren't up to that. They tire earlier in the trip, and earlier in their life.
I did have a setter that had heavy Ryman lines. She was a specialist, outstanding on late season pheasants that had been hunted hard, and a lazer on retrieve. Here she is putting the brakes on a running rooster, a rascal that had tried, at the time this picture was taken, to give her the slip for most of an hour. She nailed him down at the end of the planted field, and I took him home after I moved him off this point.
I loaded her in the truck after this trip. She was about 10. Still, it was a great feeling hunting fields that labs had worked and having her come up with birds.
She was a bumbling idiot on grouse, however. You win some, you lose some.
Best,
Ted
