Ballast resistor Q's

Simple. Read my last post again. It's the way Ma designed it. That transistor will only switch so much current. You can easily exceed that current by playing with low resistance coils, ballast, or no ballast. I have no idea what that value might be. Not all transistors fail "the same." We've got guys claiming they ran a Mopar ECU with no ballast, and others saying they failed in fairly short order.

You are not just dealing with the coil, but the limits of the ECU itself.

Also, not all Mopar "look alike" ECUs are made the same. Just to pick "from the blue sky" it might be that some of the older high quality Blue Streak units are better than Mopar, or vice versa.