Funny Top Gear has a pretty good feel for what’s special…or has the ‘IT’ factor. Let’s review
B5 RS4 - never mentioned it
C5 RS6 - mentioned it as being boring
B7 RS4 - raved about it, loved it, featured it in multiple episodes, even when it was old and being overtaken by its rivals
C6 RS6 - liked it for it’s absurdity (V10 TT), but didn’t love it or recommend it
B8 RS5 - found it a bit boring
TTRS - never mentioned it
C7 RS6/7 - never mentioned it
A unit of forced induction hp are worse than naturally aspirated hp, as far as power delivery and driving experience goes. The naturally aspirated power is always preferred. The only people who prefer forced induction hp are poor people and cheap people. That’s a bit mean, but I’m serious.
Buying 400hp from the factory is expensive. Buying 250 hp from the factory and modifying to 400 is much cheaper and easy to do with a forced induction car, thus it’s deemed better for people with no financial option to buy 400 factory hp. Never mind that the boosted car is peaky, late onset torque spike and turbo boost lag hp…thus worse than smoothe, naturally aspirated on demand power. It’s affordable, thus it’s deemed ‘better’. It’s pretty funny.
Buying 400 naturally aspirated HP from the factory in a small car is really expensive. To make that power, you either need a huge engine (AMG, SRT8 but thee are no cars they fit the SRT8 engine in), or you need RPMs (M3, RS4). To make those RPMs you need expensive as fuck internals to handle the speed. That’s an expensive endeavour, and it’s pretty understandable why a high school student with a B5 S4 would deem 400 hp from an RS4 ‘fail’ and 400 hp from a modified 2.7T win…it was only $8,000 for the B5. The bonus is that when you add a blower to a high RPM V8, you can make 600 hp in your sleep…because the M3 and RS4 forged internals can handle just about anything.