^^^ Ah, actually, you're pretty accurate on what is going on
The problem is that there are a lot of members out there who believe that:
Umnitza has a slew of design engineers here and abrod that helped to produce the "Umnitza SRI." Xtec has been accused of stealing (yeah, as in illegally taking what is not his) the technological advancements suggested through Umnitza's work. We had a whole bunch of bad threads between the vendors (and M3F members) that got way out of control. Umnitza did actually make some changes to units sold waaaaaaaay back in the day to the original SRI that shipped (it had non-fitting mounting hardware), but that problem was quickly remedied by Simota and there was no product differentiation. My favorite is that since Umnitza's SRI has a sticker on it - it is a more improved version from what Xtec sells :lol:
But, the biggest issue is that Umnitza has advertised for the longest time that his SRI was superior (he said his was all carbon fiber as well as a better option from what Xtec sold) and he was the driving force in poineering these developments for us Mazda3 owners. MikeMan was pretty pissed off at the general IMPOSSIBILITY for anyone casually using M3F to get a straight answer. Obviously, I agree that there is a degree of caveat emptor and all that when reading advertisements. I don't want to "protect" members so much as just stop the horrible speculation, vendor-bias, and fanboy-flamewars that pop up.
I think due to Umnitza's great deal of puffery and marketing efforts, he creates perceptions and general forum sentiment that discourages normal buyers from having trust in what they're buying. Yeah, he supports his product - yeah people get their products. But, most members are seriously confused, or their beliefs are horribly off base. The misleading and just general "weird" tactics that Umnitza does are creating big problems when we have to lock threads and ban members who get upset over what goes on.
Soooooo, the short answer to your question.... What do we get out of proving or disproving what Umnitza says? The forum becomes a less shitty place since the forum members can actually have conversations with retailers rather than fanboy wars about who is paying off experimentors, stealing blueprints, or lying about something being Chinese versus Japanese. Lately, Umnitza has done some things that make me rue the day that Mz6ZoomZoom allowed him to become a sponsor.