Trust me, we were all scratching our heads at how mazda could have possibly designed and configured such a crappy ecu.

My guess is they actually wanted to keep torque down in the high load regions to be easy on the weakling clutch.
And not switching to open loop til like 5k is probably to help emissions and fuel economy. Though neither is great even as is.
Whatever the reasons are, the end result is terrible. A properly tuned bolt on MSM is worlds better than a stock one or stock ecu one.

Yea in anticipation of installing my ms I've already gone ahead and upgraded to a new 255 walbro to handle the 650cc injectors I'm waiting on. I suggest a good investment being a wideband and boost gauge asap.

OP: The MSM ECU is not like something in a diesel truck. You can't just plug in a tuner and start pecking away at the code. The system is locked down and there is no tweaking until you replace it.

I don't know where, but i'm pretty sure I read that there actually is code to make the ECU go open loop on full throttle but because of crappy coding, it gets stepped on by the not til 5k code. And supposedly there are a hand ful of MSM out there that actually function correctly,don't have the 5k afterburner, and have a nice smooth power band.

Interesting world of Mazda we live in. I really appreciate all of the helpful info from everyone. I'm used to Ford and Nissan where you can just leave thr programming mostly stock and adjust what's necessary to compensate for the chosen modifications.

My car has some kind of lag until about 3k but runs smoothly after that so maybe I'm one of the lucky ones!

Its not just mazda. Pretty much every single fun car on the market these days depends heavily on tuning to extract power. Its no longer "bolt on a bunch of parts and make more power"

So yours doesn't have a sudden surge of power at 5k? And actually builds lots of torque at 3k and all the way to redline? That's surprising.

Oh I agree. Anything from vw group basically only responds to tuning.

The surge I feel is from about 2800-3500, that's it. Cross my fingers and hope it stays that way I guess.