Thanks for the input!
Everything that's listed in black font is what is planned, but plans are always subject to change so don't take any of that to be set in stone. Anything in cyan is "eh maybe" status and likely will not be done. I'm actually not committed to or dead set on any particular turbo upgrade at the moment. I will very likely go with the Whoosh hybrid, to be honest. Stock fitment and stock-like spool is more important to me than having bigger peak output numbers. Another example of possible plan changes is the downpipe - I would like to stay catted and should it get released I will jump on a "V2" Whoosh catted DP with a beefier bracket than the V1. Or maybe stay stock, haha. I love the sound of the Thermal R&D exhaust, though, so that one is a certainty.
As for brake pads - yeah, I like the performance of the stockers, but I was beyond over them by day two of scrubbing my wheels clean. Even if the EBC Reds performed a bit worse than the OEM ones, I'd take 'em just for the lack of brake dust getting everywhere.
And ethanol tunes, I do understand and appreciate the effect that they have on our cars, but I have no interest in them. I grumble enough about mixing oil into gasoline for my two-stroke engines and I have a ratio-rite to make that easy! I don't want to deal with sourcing E85 and calculating appropriate ethanol content for a tune. I MIGHT try an E30 tune in the future, but mostly as a novelty. Until then, it's just gas and go!
The LSD will very likely be purchased within a week, and installed within a month or so. I'll be doing it with the help of a good friend who recently did his own transmission replacement on his Chevy Spark, and I've been somewhat obsessively studying the appropriate service literature for this job and acquiring any necessary tools that I don't own. Now, I've heard that once you hit around 380hp in the FiST you can start to run into tramlining (following grooves in the road surface, etc) with an LSD, but I have no plans to push output that high and I want to avoid one-wheel-peels and have better traction overall.
If there is interest, I will try to document the LSD install process.
For the braces, well, if Hotchkis follows through on releasing their own I'll snap those up instead of Pierce. 2-point, 4-point, or 6-point, I've got no skin in that debate but I really like how the 6-point braces look and tie everything together. Now that I think of it, I should probably update the OP to reflect that I did grab one of those $86 Hotchkis RSBs and won't be getting the Pierce torsion bar.
Oh, and to answer your question, yes my exterior appearance is stock besides the mudflaps, so I don't care much about showing it off. It's a white platinum FiST, no different from any other. I like the look of many of the front splitter options we have, but I fear it'd be a ~$200 investment that will be promptly obliterated by a rock or something, as has been the experience of people on here and some others that I know personally.