Hello ise - great to meet you on here. Hope we can meet up next season - maybe on the North face again!
I changed my set-up last season because I wanted to ski differently - all over the mountains rather than on piste and following some great advice here and from davidof directly, I purchased a pair of Scarpa Tornado boots, what are termed ‘Freerando’ or as I view them, a hybrid touring/alpine boot. They are absolutely great. Coupled with Dynastar Legend Pro skis in 186 and Fritchi Freeride Plus bindings, I was very happy and found this entire set-up really great.
I was poorly advised in the past - especially regarding lengths and widths of ski. Most vendors view a persons height as the bench mark for selecting ski length, but at 90 kilos I was struggling until I got onto these longer and wider Dynastars. I carry an ABS pack as well and random binding releases were becoming a worry - a consideration highlighted by davidof on this thread. This is an extremely important point to consider if you are going all-mountain - binding release is just not an option in some places! Freeride Plus are a good safe option in this respect.
Your choice of bindings, I suppose will relate to the type of skiing that you want to do. Personally, I love hiking up to a chair lift/snow line, climb, skin for a couple of hours and then ski a fairly long backcountry route, maybe with another bit of skinning/climbing in between and possibly a walk out. The set-up that I have is very strong and robust, not to mention comfortable. Yes it’s a bit heavy, but it suits my needs and in my view these bindings give me an added safety margin. And contrary to what you might imagine, this set-up is great on-piste as well. I have skied about 80 days last season on these and I just wish I had that same knowledge the season before, when I was in Bourg. One set-up ‘does all-mountain’. For my purposes, its the adaptability of the Freeride Plus bindings that’s the attraction. You and I are a fairly similar build - before writing this I looked at a photo of us on Bellecote!
I haven’t tried any multi-day touring with these though! - I am reasonably strong & fit though and genuinely don’t mind the extra weight. I do find this topic interesting to the point of researching possible lighter options, though with the Scarpa Tornados, the Dynafit system is not possible. I will be cautious though as I really like this set-up - “If it isn’t broke - don’t fix it!” syndrome. I don’t imagine that I will ever return to ‘Alpine’ boots though and will probably test some other Freerando boots next season. Davidof has his finger on the pulse of all related developments, with some great research and facts on this site.