This may sound like its off topic, but stick with me for a couple of minutes. I am nearly certain that it is a comment about motorcycles you have never seen before, but its one that is worth your time.
Did you ever own a powered-boat? Small craft, and particularly boats that are powered by out-board engines, use propellers to change power into motion, and those propellers are generally chosen by rule of thumb and general demands than anyone actually paying attention to getting the right prop on the boat for the type of use it sees.
Without going into the things that make one prop different than another, other than to say diameter, pitch, number and size of blades, and even the material the prop is made of can make a very very large difference in how a boat performs. While a prop does more on a boat than sprockets do on a motorcycle they do share on duty, they set the ratio at which power from the engine may be applied to the environment to produce motion.
Now here is how you 'prop' a boat - it is the simplest thing in the world to do. You take the boat out onto a body of water where you can operate it undisturbed at its full speed. You put it in gear and you run it as hard as it will run and while you are doing that you 'trim' the boat for its maximum speed. Then with it running balls to the wall you look at the tachometer with just one question in mind. Is it attaining the manufacturer's recommended red-line? If it is not you need to change props for one that will - maybe one with smaller blades, maybe one with a smaller diameter, maybe one with less pitch.
Motorcycles are no different. If you are unable to wrench full performance out of your engine in top gear then your overall gearing is wrong.
Motorcycles: Is your motorcycle able to attain its redline on flat roadway in its top gear at full throttle? If it can not then you have too little rear gear or too much front gear. If, on the other hand, your bike is able to over-rev in top gear then you should do the opposite, find a front gear with more teeth or a rear with less. The point is to gear such that the full engine potential may be utilized.
On Edit: I came to realize this after watching videos on You Tube. I have had boats for decades and spent thousands and thousands of dollars on propellers. In fact prop selection is a more or less constant subject among boaters. The method they use to select is a valid one, it allows you to obtain the best performance possible from your engine while at the same time avoiding lugging it (an engine that can not attain its full RPM in top gear is lugging at every other RPM, nor is the engine's potential being wasted by under-gearing. Where You Tube came into it was that while watching vid's of guys showing how fast their bikes were I noticed that at least among the 550's virtually none of them was much above about about 7000~8000 RPM when they topped out in 5th gear, even though they would go nearly 9000 in the other gears. That told me that they were cheating themselves of top end, midrange acceleration, and fuel economy.
