CJ, how's about a bit of whiplash :lol:
There's nothing wrong with threads like this - it's a mutual exchange of opinions as far as I'm concerned. It's good to try and dispell some myths as hopefully people learn along the way too - that's how I've been learning.
On the subject of self learning ECU's, all modern ECU's are self learning and adapt to your driving style. But the learning capabilities only extend to within the limits of the hard written map settings. So if you give the ECU new maps, it will only learn within those new constraints.
This is why dyno tuning STANDARD UNMODIFIED road cars on a dyno (most likely in a few hours) is not good. Even if you start from a so called 'generic' tune file and then customise it to that customer car, what you are doing is starting from a mod file and then bespoking it further. But what you're forgetting is that the reason each car even with the same software revision behaves differently could be down to simple things like the quality of fuel in the car at the time, the cleanliness of the filters, the mileage the car has had, the climatic conditions at the time it's on the dyno etc etc. Far too many variables.
If this method was good, then each time your car went to Honda, they should be modifying the software in accordance with the condition of your car at the time.
Dyno tuning has an extremely important place in tuning. It should be used as part of developing a proper setting file for the particular software revision in question, coupled with on the road testing. Dyno tuning of course is the best way to bespoke tune when you have a modified car.
The problem is a lot of companies have invested in dyno's and the world has moved on. People are interested in what their cars are making on the dyno (it's only natural) but in truth what most customers want is good usable and reliable power. If you use a dyno to tune two same cars, but one makes more power than the other on their standard factory runs, what happens when the customer with the lower run maybe services the car or switches to better fuel or was just a victim of bad climatic conditions on the day of the run or the dyno was just set up wrong? There is also then the question of one dyno vs another dyno as no two dyno's give you the same results! It's all down to how the dyno is set up and unfortunately some tuners will deliberately either inflate figures or show lower figures to sell you something..