That’s because the bikes now more linear, you’ll be using more travel on high speed hits with less sag and less progressiveness – but still have decent midstroke support.
The same was recommended to me on another thread – there have been quite a few recently on shock/fork performance that I’ve either commented on or started. It’s worth having a look – I’ll see if I can find the links.
But monarchs aren’t designed for 12 foot drops on downhill tracks, they’re only basically adjustable – a downhill shock is usually more sensitive so that you can run them harder and because the damping circuits are more complicated and less spikey you are less reliant on the spring to dial the shock in and can run the fork more on the damping circuits. Trail bikes are where rally cars were back in the 90’s, where the spring was used for support – the downhill shocks are coming closer in terms of performance to where rally car shocks are now – where they can run massive amounts of compression and softer springs without the associated spiking. What we really need are three chamber air shocks or a wide choice of progressive springs so that we can really dial in the mid stroke support and bottom out resistance to exactly how we want. The progressiveness in current dual chamber air shocks, starts far to early – shock progression that starts much later but becomes aggressively progressive would be better.