My riding is mostly tight, twisty, technical singletrack- average speeds of only 4-5 mph. Short punchy ups and downs, natural rollers, rocks with more rocks on top of them. I get maybe a half dozen days a year of lift service at places like Killington and Thunder Mountain.
TL;DR If you have experience with either (or both) the Rimpo V2/AF or the Rascal in lower speed, punchy tech, please weigh in.
If you're spending your bike park days at Killington and Thunder, and your home trails have that old-school "slow tech" feel, you must be a New Englander on the hunt for the elusive New England trail bike! It's a difficult quest, especially given that so many highly-lauded, boutique American frame manufacturers are based either in the Rockies, California, and the PNW -- all places with bigger elevation gain/loss and riding cultures that focus more on sustained descents, high speeds, and relatively smooth, flowy terrain. Despite the influx of machine-built trail building in VT and NH the past 5-10 years I still find myself riding a lot of slower, techier stuff, which is why I ended up on a Rascal -- my current choice as the perfect "New England trail bike."
re. Ripmo: I only have a few hours on the Ripmo v2, but I rode the Ripmo v1 with a Float X2 quite extensively, and I thought it was an impressively speedy and efficient all-rounder, though with a noted weakness for that sort of awkward, physical, slow riding that seems endemic to our region. The way Ibis has been tuning their DW-Link in the past few years, it feels absolutely incredible -- so fast, so smooth -- when pedaling hard and pumping through berms and high-speed features, but the traction is really limited at slower speeds when trying to finesse the bike instead of gunning it. When If anything, I found that the added progressivity of the v2 Ripmo over the v1 made it even more difficult to keep the rear wheel planted when climbing jumbled, techy stuff.
The Rascal, on the other hand... I can't say enough good things about the way the bike picks apart janky, weird, off-camber trails where traction is at a minimum, both ascending and descending. It was a fun challenge this past fall to try and find a situation in my usual riding (which sounds a lot like yours) that exposed a weakness in the bike's design. I was cleaning climbs with relative ease that I thought reserved for a sub-25lb. XC bike, but also finding extra momentum and plushness on descents I usually avoided. And, unlike with most modern trail/all-mountain bikes that tend to flail and flop on slow-speed tech, I never have to avoid those tight, old-school, relatively flat trails that I'd otherwise find frustrating on a bike like the Ripmo. The Rascal wants to slice its way through flat corners and pick up speed with just a couple pedalling jabs. At some point I'm going to start sounding like a broken record about this, but I believe that the way Revel has tuned the CBF suspension system to work with the Rascal puts it above and beyond other linkage designs as fast as plushness, traction, pedaling platform and small-bump compliance.
I wouldn't mind having a bit more travel on the Rascal -- at this point I'm actively hoping that Revel's new 2021 bike will be a long(er)-travel 29er -- but I also wouldn't want to dull the bike and make it lose that blend of sharp cornering and mid-stroke plushness. With it set up at 130/140 with a DPX2 and a Fox 36 Grip 2, I've never found myself wishing for more travel on handbuilt, techy trails. The bike's only limiting point is going full-speed into successive big hits where a longer wheelbase and lower BB would keep it more planted. And given what you're saying about your home trails, I wouldn't want to fall into the trap of assuming that "more travel is better." You may find that the Rascal's shorter travel makes the bike a bit more responsive, agile and quick to maneuver. Even if you were to run the same fork on the Rascal and the Ripmo, that extra 20mm of travel isn't always in your favor -- especially when you're constantly lifting and squashing the front wheel through roots and rocks. Personally, I don't want a super long, low and slack bike, no matter how far the industry may go in that direction.
I think your question well exemplifies one of the big conflicts/divides we see in bike design today -- how does a product manager/frame engineer in northern California effectively understand what a bike needs to function well in a totally different environment? I love the wide gamut of trails in NorCal (they're arguably some of the most fun trails anywhere), and I love the local trails near my house, but they're not all that similar. In fact, you might even say they're pretty dissimilar when you consider that different trails demand different suspension tuning and kinematics choices, alongside more obvious geometry differences. The Rascal might feel a little muted at high speeds ripping down 3rd Divide in Downieville, and the Ripmo feels clunky and hesitant in technical, low-speed terrain that we have in abundance in the northeast.
I think my bigger bias point in recommending the Rascal for your riding isn't that I own a Rascal, it's that I have a strong aversion to the modern MTB cultural attitude that seems to think one bike could work for all sorts of riders in all sorts of different locations. If you want the optimal bike, it has to be optimal for YOUR terrain. While the Ripmo is hardly a bad bike, it's a far cry from the exceptionally nimble, flat-corner-dissecting feel of the Rascal. Coming out of CO, you wouldn't expect Revel to make fantastic bikes for old-school New England riding... yet they do.
