Hi, the benders do offer quite a lot of resistance. For me, I quite like the firmness of it, and the response generally. I know it’s not for everyone. I’ve reengineered a bender variant that has a very light feel. These will soon be available from our shop for customer replacement. I thought this would be a nice thing to add l, that lets people really make the instrument their own. We will be similarly offering knob cap sets for Gemini, for those who don’t like the orange, which I personally like a lot.. it’s hard to get it right!