What Gear Ratio?

If I want to be at a certain speed, I'll look more closely at IPT. If I want more torque for high-resistance baits, looking at gear ratio will be more useful to me. 

I agree with this pretty much. I do take gear ratio into consideration when purchasing a reel, but that's because I'm considering other performance questions besides speed. Different sized gears will yield completely different results compared to other reels of the same ratio, so for most intents and purposes the IPT rating seems to be a better gauge of rate of line retrieved.

Unfortunately my assumption is that when one asks about gear ratio it is in reference to the speed of retrieve and not other factors. The original post in this thread mentioned speed and nothing else other than the type of baits that would potentially be thrown with the reel.