Again folks, I am reporting my experience. At no time did I ask for quick turnaround. Quality itself is expected and there is no negotiating on that. Cost is irrelevant. Tuners charge whatever, however they want and you either accept or you don't have budget. So that's irrelevant too.
Now if anyone else comes in to give obvious comments about how one should "be sure to be have clear goals for the tuner to tune".... my head is going to explode.
1. Even before tuning, all mods were explained in detail and the goal was explained:
"I have Dinan S3 under warranty for a few years, warranty is out and I heard that Dinan S3 is not that powerful so I am interested in using you to see how much more power than Dinan we can get out of this engine since it is out of warranty. I have also upgraded inlets and outlets so can you also take this into account when tuning? I also have upgraded to 3.5 tMap."
That is a summary of my talks before tuning. Now... I did NOT mention that under Wedge, my transmission went kablooey and thus I had to replace with an upgraded Propulsive Dynamics unit, which seems to be taking the tuning sessions just fine. I looked at a few Wedge logs and saw under stock tranny there were times when there was over 650nm torque... but alas, I cannot blame Wedge for the tranny failure since the original had 70K on it. Regardless, it was the daily driving or undrivability of Wedge that caused me to completely stop revisions after 12 tries. I simply did not want to risk any damage to my newly replaced engine.
And after 12 revisions... not really feeling safe with Wedge, I switched to Twisted, which feels much more smooth and less clunky but had comparable power to Dinan s3... I explained the entire process of Wedge to Twisted and he made the necessary adjustments as he saw fit. Now there is a new map that seems to be feeling very smooth and has a bit more power so I think he is make the adjustments as per my goals. I think after one or maybe two more maps, it will be locked down - smooth, controlled and more power than Dinan.
Based on your understanding of things I'm not inclined to give much credence to your opinion.