Thanks, man! I hadn't seen that.
You've
got to be kidding me. That is legitimately going twenty miles out of their way to complicate something that has no reason to be anything other than incredibly simple.
I'm going to print that to go through it more thoroughly, but damn. Doesn't make a lick of sense from a design perspective mechanically or electrically, and my concern that the systems expect each other to be functional and communicative seems warranted now. It also explains why turning systems off doesn't really produce the effects I'd expect normally.
No wonder it's all over the damned place. It can't
not be. One of my earlier postulations was a note in regard to the engine and transmission expecting instantaneous signals from one another, and simply letting a human pick the gears potentially threw a wrench into all of that cleverness; making guesswork of computational convention. My hypothesis was that, given it's further integration and data feed to the ECU and traction control system, the DSG produces an objectively better car, and that the manual-equipped GTI was broken on paper before it ever hit the road because it doesn't have that further integration.
I think the exact wording was something along the lines of "This is one event in which another computer might
actually be the answer", or something to that effect. Looks like I wasn't too far off.
What happens if I replace that differential with a conventional mechanical unit? Is that even possible within reason, at this point? On one hand, it doesn't look complicated to remove mechanically, but there's always more to it, and I don't know how the electronic systems would react. Do people ever remove these and fit something normal?