Higher brace heights, straight or deflex risers instead of reflexed ones, soft cams vs high performance ones... those all help make bows more forgiving and, as mentioned, tend to make for a bow that shoots a slower arrow. Longer axle to axle lengths don't affect arrow speed so much, but the longer bows do resist 3rd axis torque better than shorties. One important factor - and one that is often overlooked by the average guy - is having a handle that fits your hand, is comfortable and forces you into the same grip each time you pick up the bow. Very few bows that are on the market today have a decent grip, IMO.

They could make a short, light, forgiving bow if they wanted to. Problem is, they'd have to drastically cut arrow speeds and slow bows don't sell. Most everybody has some unexplainable notion that a fast bow is more important than one that will shoot where you aim it, regardless of whether your form is right on the money or not.

When you think about it, comparing a 300 fps arrow vs a 240 fps arrow, the 300 fps arrow gets to 30 yards only .075ths of a second faster than the 240 fps arrow. The difference in trajectory at 30 yards is negligible. Since I rarely take hunting shots beyond 25 yards, I don't consider forfieting the forgiving bow just for the sake of a few hundredths of a second difference in flight time, especially under hunting conditions.

In field archery, where consistent accuracy at known yardages is the goal, where you're shooting 112 arrows for a round and fatigue is a factor, a forgiving bow will account for more points on the scorecard. The rock solid form started off with on target 1 can start getting a little soft and mushy by the time you get to target 28.

On the 3D course though, where folks often shoot at targets that are far beyond the distances they'd ever take in an actual hunting situations, where they have all the time in the world to make sure their form is spot on, where they're only shooting a paltry 30 or 40 arrows in an entire day and fatique is not a factor (although boredom could be ), then the extra speed can be more important than forgiveness if their yardage estimation sucks.

Then it depends on your shooting style. A carry-over from all my years of shooting recurves and longbows, my shooting style with compounds is loose and fluid, but not sloppy either. So a bow that's very forgiving is extremely important for me. Unforgiving, fast bows demand a very strict, mechanical shooting style, with everything exactly duplicated on each shot, right down to how much pressure you put on a given area of the bow's grip. Just a slight, seemingly insignificant change of pressure on some of the worst, most unforgiving bows will cause dramatic differences in group sizes. I've never done well with that kind of shooting style, but I'm sure others fare better with the mechanical style of shooting.

But, how important is forgiveness? I can only tell you how important it is for me. You can decide for yourself how important it is to you.