needs to be thrown off the wall !
... and its some wall, sounds like you've been there?
When I saw the BM I thought of Celli's bike.
As for the cruiser ... they did have some stuff in the Ducati Museum on the Apollo which I thought was a bit weird at the time - especially since there were no scooters to be seen (and they actually made scooters ... interestingly one of which was called the Cruiser
).
It is interesting how people see it as killing the brand - much the same as I suspect ha been said before for various things: wet clutches, 4-cylinder bikes, water-cooled and new-style monsters
... probably the loss of the bevel drive, etc, etc.
When a company only makes 40,000 bikes a year (or whatever it is) - you probably don't need to sell that many to make a new model viable, considering the amount of likely donor parts from the rest of the range. And the size of the motorcycle market worldwide would indicate there is a large enough niche to make it happen ... and guess where you are likely to find that niche most prevalent? ... and what would be the dominant player in that market current? ... see it all makes perfect sense
