What Nick said. There are a bunch of people out there, tuners included, who have just now accepted some of the initial EJ20 limitations; cheap intakes like AEM's don't work on stock cars, headers on a stock turbo are pointless, etc.
These theories are being proven wrong repeatedly on the whole new animal the EJ25 is; you've got way more exhaust flow, so the heat reduction from unwrapped headers is more than offset by the flow rates going way up. Well designed intakes like the Injens work well with a tune, and some of the larger setups like the Perrin big MAF setups are the way to go when you're running larger injectors and can scale accordingly.
To put it simply there's alot of people that are just now catching up with the conventional knowledge that some of us picked up from people that have been tuning Subarus in other markets for way longer than they've been available here.
Like Nick said, common knowledge about cars be damned, we've seen headers and intakes make huge differences on the 2.5's. Of note is that Nick's car actually exceeds Slowboy's expectations for the GT30-12 with the generic "intake and headers" allowance, but the particular setups we're running are recommended for a reason
