All I know is, I had similar issues to this dude, and I'm not the only one. I tried a few different configurations, some were better. Eventually I probably could have gotten it "right". I think MS can work perfectly with almost any setup given enough iterations of tests.
When i got the VEMS (which is by no means a polished or commercial system in its own right) I plugged the ****ing coils in and the car worked. I adjusted the dwell once. That was it. No wierd VR ****, no misfires, no nothing, and that was 24psi, 7600rpm, 540whp, pump gas, so it had legit ignition requirements.
I didn't "know what I was doing" more with the vems. Maybe I just got lucky. All I know is I'm not the only one with a similar tale, so it's hard to fault a guy for at least *perceiving* MS as having some limitations. Expecting him to spend days or weeks or months of his life to learn how to make his MS work right, just because you did (and kudos for doing so), isn't always realistic. Some people just don't want to tinker with that stuff. So yeah, "not knowing" is a reflection of a "limitation" in my mind. Just my personal expererience. I'm not slagging MS and one of the new Pro units would be top of the list if I were to start a project tomorrow. I'm just saying I can see where he's coming from.
Who hasn't had problems with one thing or another on MS?
The thing I was trying to get at was, everyone blames the MS right out the gate. Who doesn't have problems with LH? but everyone lists off a dozen things before they circle back around to "well maybe it's an issue with LH". With MS that's where the troubleshooting always seems to begin and one of the hardest things experience has taught me is that it's not generally an issue with the MS itself.. occasionally with a choice in external components, more often than not something else semi-related, and sure, on (annoyingly seldom I might add) something on/in the MS itself.
Something else that is annoyingly realistic (it seems) is projecting one's own failures on some product.. "oh well it does that because it's MS'd and that's just what they do"... this mindset is not limited to the volvo world by any means, so I'm not trying to single anyone out, just another observation... You (the proverbial, not the concrete) not knowing how to solve a problem with a tool does not mean the tool is faulted... I deal with this mindset every single day at work.. people that get paid embarrassingly large amounts of money for technical positions that then apparently don't even know enough about what they said they did to be able to google how to do the relatively simple task they're trying to accomplish. There should be a bit of an expectation that yes, you will sit down and spend time to figure this thing out, but it seems to end up being quite the opposite.. I bought this gadget for my car because I see a bunch of people have it, now my car runs like ****, this gadget must be ****. By that logic people should be throwing cams and 15g's away by the hundreds but they don't...
So to this I say, why not look at what a particular thing does well and see maybe why it does it better than others. Or maybe look around at what other people are doing with the system you have that don't seem to have the issues as presented.
getting upset because someone spent the time to understand something better is at best a sad excuse for an (easily correctable) personal shortcoming. I'm not bagging on someone jumping ship, hell I tucked and rolled with something that on paper looks absolutely amazing, and other people do amazing things with it, but when it came time for the rubber to hit the road, the extreme measures that were taken to 'close' the system off from end users (all while attempting to tout end-user features) and channel end users through re-sellers ended up being extremely limiting and basically cost me three years of car development even though I was able to extract decent results in spite of the stonewalling on the part of the ProEFI staff.
All that to circle back and say that the issue is a setup issue. You had problems that vanished with different ignitors.. I used onboard bip's to light off 20psi and a 75 shot of giggle gas and still pulled a smooth dyno graph. I'm not all that convinced that it was an amazingly superior knowledge of the system, maybe a good grasp on the fundamentals, but again, whose fault is that?