Miles is terrible, and hours is only terribly discouraging if you can’t consistently ride 15-30 hours/week 
Hours is a simple first principles metric on the easy heart muscle and leg muscle contractions (and implied low autonomic stress and possible glycogen recovery from riding below LT1) that are the foundation of endurance conditioning.
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Agree that “miles” is pretty terrible, but at least it’s somewhat of a function of both intensity and duration (along with a bunch of other stuff like wind, surface, elevation change, etc.). Hours tell you much less. You can ride a bike for an hour at a pace that is much easier than walking and only a few ticks above sitting on the couch. Or you can ride super hard for an hour and be completely wrecked. As a measure of training volume, I’d just argue that miles is less terrible than hours. Knowing available hours to train is important for budgeting time, but it’s not a metric that you’d use to ramp/track training with any degree of accuracy.
I also agree with the comments on TSS being imperfect, but it’s decent and that’s what I use to managing my progression. Besides being a better choice than hours, miles, or Kj’s, many of the mainstream tools for managing progression lean on TSS (with corresponding CTL and stress balance) as the primary metrics.
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FWIW I have tracked kJ work and hours for 7+ years. And CTL/TSS/IF. You know what correlates the most to my fitness ups/downs? Hours and amount of threshold work. I’ve spent 3 years analyzing my data back and it couldn’t be more clear for someone that never averaged more than 8 hours/week over a year.
If you haven’t heard it, checkout an interesting Empirical Cycling podcast “Perspectives #34: Quantifying Training Volume, with Marinus Petersen” published June 9th.
My latest unpopular opinion (and data) is that mostly riding easy by rpe, on as little as 5-7 hours/week) is better for both health & performance. I’m retirement age, a desk jockey with very little endurance experience. Now if you only care about performance, well I have some thoughts and data about that too. But the performance only focus left me with signs of a haywire heart and a body that started slowly breaking down.
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Yep, there is a big difference between exercising for health reasons and optimizing performance. They are at odds with each other once you get beyond a reasonable level of fitness. It’s all better than sitting on the couch watching TV with beer and pizza, but training at a very high level for performance is generally not beneficial to your health. For folks who aren’t paid to race their bikes, the risk/reward of training on the the hairy edge for months at a time to squeeze out a little more performance is pretty stupid. But here we are…
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training for health and performance aren’t that far apart, however there is a lot of well intentioned but misguided info just a search term or ChatGPT click away.
I think you’ve misunderstood my response. No snark intended. There are lots of metrics kicking around (Garmin, intervals.icu, TSS, CTL, etc). If somebody thinks they these are not meeting their need, I encourage them to poke around and see what they can come up with that works for them (KWh/week, heartbeats per day, whatever they like). All metrics are abstracts, so nothing has to be (or will be) perfect. We are not talking about publication-quality research - just finding something that works for an individual. If they don’t have the skills themselves, starting a thread on “what would be a better metric for longer periods?” would be place to start.
@Neuromancer - Apologies if my post came across as snark.
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I’m with @wirt here.
You don’t need to go custom; you just need to buy a Defy over a TCR.
In fact, just wait a bit; the geometry on the bikes coming out of China nowadays (e.g. something like a seka spear) shows that where we are going is bikes for the runclub / MAAP crowd - aka people who dress like pros but have a 125w ftp.
It’s getting harder and harder to find a 390ish reach bike with anything less than 560 stack so you end up back in the realms of buying a childs bike and putting a silly 2000s 130+ stem on it.
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I feel so seen 
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Rather than measuring what truly matters, we tend to pull together data that is readily accessible without stopping to ask what we need to be measuring and how the insights will help move our business forward.
What we’ve found is a bit unsettling to data scientists: some of the things organizations currently measure are largely irrelevant or outright useless – and can even be misleading
I think we’ve all got spreadsheets 
First you need to ask why, what is it that you are trying to understand and for what purpose.
IMO we want to understand how much training we are doing in order to support established training principles;
- Progressive overload
- Consistency
- Planning training for those first two
- And avoid over training/injury.
To me, that means you must have a metric beyond time, there has to be elements of attributes of the training to be an effective measure
Someone posted upthread that any given cycling week or training tends toward a 0.6-0.7 IF, so if you add that as an assumption to your time measure of volume then at least you have something,
At the other end of the spectrum you could have a break down of time in zone, power and heart rate, some kind of measure of skills training (time in aero, complexity of descents), I’m sure you could really go to town.
In the middle I’m starting to suspect that kJ is a good all round measure of how much training a person has done and easily lends itself to planning for progressive overload and consistency. Also as an indicator of over training maybe as a percentage. Also lends itself easily to multisport.
It has limitations, of course; it doesn’t describe aerobic/anaerobic for example.
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Sacrilege!
Step 1 is understanding the fundamentals of what drives improvements in performance, step 2 is collecting data, and step 3 is doing experiments over appropriate timeframes and having a good analysis tool.
Cart before the horse. My interpretation of the last 100 years of endurance science differs from yours. And I have multi-year data that I believe appears to prove my understanding is correct.
FWIW I agree with this guy:
and world-class coaches that share that view, like this one: Is Adaptive Training Gaslighting Me? - #5 by WindWarrior
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I think we understand this to mean different things. Each to their own, I will have my unpopular opinion and you can have yours 
Wouldn’t call mine unpopular given all the coaches you will find nodding in agreement.
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I never said that I had 40mm of spacers. My comment was in response to a comment about someone else who was being made fun of because they had 40mm of spacers. And flexibility is only partially trainable. For example, I am almost 64 and have some arthritis of the lower lumbar vertebrae. All, the stretching in the world won’t make that better. I am simply less flexible than I used to be. I do agree with the sentiment that riders ought to buy a frame sized to them and their flexibility. Many (most?) people that I see out riding are on a bike with too much drop so they end up with an odd fit. This is made worse by the fact that most higher end bikes are not offered in models with a geometry designed to fit average people. Thek used to do this but discontinued it.
Great article summing a lot up in one place. Thanks for sharing.
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Hey! I resemble that remark! 
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I think that in a more or less steady state, TSS works pretty well. If you do more of the same kinds of things you typically do, more endurance pace riding in addition to your intervals, more time in sweet spot, etc., it should pretty accurately reflect the change in training load.
Thinking about some of the objections raised to TSS…technical MTB descent vs coming straight down a bike path, riding in the heat, the 5th hour being harder than the first, wouldn’t hrTSS account for those factory fairly well?