Unfortunately I don't have the time or patience to address every reply individually but I'll summarize my thoughts as follows.
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Please don't put words in my mouth. All I said was that saying that more power was useless on the street was clearly erroneous.
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Useless? That's a stretch and more likely an argument of semantics than anything. You can make up all sorts of unrealistic situations where a hundred more horsepower would save your life or something silly like that so at best it's debatable, but I'll humor you. Let's look at the 370Z as an example as that has quite a bit of power. If you could survey the owner of every 370Z and see how often they used the entire potential of the engine the answer would be well below 1%. If we're actually talking peak horsepower the number would be astronomically low, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say simply "at full throttle" since the area under the power curves is what's important blah blah etc. Anyway, 1% is obvious as the vast majority of any driver's time is spent waiting at stop lights, in traffic, cruising on the highway, etc. This number is likely true even for the most spirited of drivers and weekend warriors, nevermind all the people who bought the car for other reasons. Even on the average track you'd be very surprised at how little time the engine is producing its maximum potential power.
Now let's take that 1% of the time the car is driven at full throttle and estimate how much of that occurs during street driving (since the argument you're making is that more power is not useless for daily driving) and how of that percentage, how much
is necessary to achieve some goal that 200hp could not have.
The answer, quite simply, is zero.
I'm sure you're thinking I'm just pulling numbers out of thin air, and I absolutely am, but
without advocating severely breaking the law there is simply no argument to be made that will justify having more power in a street going car. If you having 300 hp vs 200 hp is the difference in being able to pass someone then you're driving recklessly, potentially a felony offense. End of story, especially yours if you are caught doing it. Some simple physics calculations will show you that in any given situation in which an extra hundred horsepower would save you from a collision or some other outlandish situation, the amount of time to be "gained" from the added power is minute fractions of a second, far below what you'd have gained by simply paying more attention while driving. You don't use your full attention to drive, nor do I, nor does anyone else on the planet. I will assure you that improving how you drive is a much better use of your time, effort and money than any amount of added power. The only argument left is that of laziness: you don't want to downshift, you don't want to rev the engine up, etc. Guess what? This isn't the car for you.
Am I arguing that the car
shouldn't have more power? No.
Some people will spend ungodly amounts of money and produce astronomical numbers with the car, and if that's their prerogative then more power to them.
What I am saying is that daily driving is NOT any sort of justification for it to have more power. There are a lot of factors that went into determing the performance of the car, perhaps chief among them being price. And this is the thing that many people seem to be missing. They understand that more power means more money, and maybe are even willing to pay more money for it. What they are missing is that Toyota/Subaru is
not marketing this car to those people. There are already plenty of cars in that segment for you to choose from. Would you go on a Ferrari board and complain that they are too expensive? Would you go on a Honda Civic board and complain that you can't comfortably fit 8 people and your dog? Probably not. So why would you come here and complain that this car doesn't have enough power when there's plenty of alternatives in your price range that are better suited to your interests?
This car is not for people looking to spend 35k.
This car is not for people looking for 300 horsepower without extensive modifications.
It is what it is. Many, many people will buy this car and drive it for years to come without ever touching it beyond basic maintanence. Others will modify it to make gobs of power and do whatever else they want or need. But if this car is not what you want and doing extra work beyond initial purchase does not interest you then do not buy. Take it or leave it, we will not miss you.