This article was good but not great, because without a parallel test of wheels without the FTD we don't really know if it made a difference. Ideally you would have run into all the same curbs and rocks with and w/o FTD, and the broken wheels and flat tires from the stock wheelset would confirm that FTD did anything. This is a lot like hearing friends say "I crashed wearing my helmet/neck brace/elbow guards/spine protector and it saved my life." Well, maybe it did. But maybe it didn't. We have no way of knowing. I've run into a lot of...
I would never, ever, ever want to go back to a coil fork. Coil rear sure, especially on a little dick bike that's getting hammered in the rear suspension, but why would you give up the air spring tuning?
I wonder what the response from bike designers would have been in 2001 if you had told them, "Just make the top tube three inches longer, the bars four inches wider, and the head angle five degrees slacker. It'll be great. Trust me."