Questions about electronic vs HEI

A few years ago, Ford was considering going production on using a special head gasket with multiple fingers to throw a spark across the whole cylinder. Eliminating the spark plug would give many advantages, but I am guessing they feared that customers wouldn't appreciate having to pull the head for a "tune-up", plus might have needed a mega-HEI to jump all the way across.

But, there is much hype in spark plug world. Ever notice that the Split-fire ads said they first ran regular spark plugs (cold engine), then ran Split-fire (warmed up) and got improved HP. They never actually stated that was due to the spark plugs, so you couldn't sue them. Some tuners spend much time adding shims to try to "clock" their spark plugs, but the "optimal clocking" appears to be more an assumption than based on data.