Thank you for the explanation.
My uneducated guess was that a less complex system (a straight through pipe) would yield better results. Also, I'm keen on the weight savings as well as the aesthetics of the titanium headers.
But your point seems valid to me and I will hold off till we see some concrete results.
The thing to beware of is that removing complexity doesn't necessarily improve performance. The cat is positioned a specific distance from the head for good reason. It acts as an expansion chamber, and acts to ensure a vacuum is generated at exactly the right time for exhaust scavenging, where a negative pressure pulse travels back up the header to arrive at exactly the right time at the head and help suck out the exhaust gasses.
Balance pipes have a similar effect so their location, length and volume is also critical, so just "removing all this
[email protected]" doesn't make things magically work better, because they weren't added to cripple the performance; they were added to improve it. Sure, it might be partly emissions related, but performance is a huge factor.
Likewise with the decat modules. Replacing the cat with an expansion chamber that retains the appropriate back-pressure while removing the turbulence and maintaining gas velocity seems to be the key (which I believe is why the larger pipe was used on the Meerkat), and I reckon this is why so many people who stripped the guts from their cats had issues; they created a huge empty void, with no smooth airflow, which is far more turbulent than the cat itself, because at least the cat had channels to direct the gas!
Straight titanium pipes with no expansion points, and one dodgy balance pipe at a seemingly random distance from the head? I'm not overly optimistic, but feel free to be the guinea-pig and let us know
Aesthetics I can understand, as titanium can look nice, but weight saving? If the current system is about 6Kg, you'll save 2Kg. As my mate (who was an IoM TT racer) said "If I want to drop a few kilos, I take a good dump before I go out on the track!"
