i think it really depends on your driving style/personal preference. personally i love the hotchkis set, i have messed around with all the settings and i like both the front and rear on stiff. with the front bar on stiff, the car loves slaloms and is very responsive to quick inputs of the steering wheel. also, i feel with both the sways on stiff you can throw the car into turns harder and pull out quicker. i also have never had trouble getting the car to rotate with a bigger front bar, so i would say its all up to how you drive the car, see what works for you.

 

The front bar will do a lot. Both bars will reduce body roll. The ratio of front sway to rear sway stiffness affects rotation (oversteer/understeer). Increasing rear stiffness in relation to the front promotes more oversteer and vice versa. That is why you dont go a lot stiffer than the trd in the rear without running a larger bar in the front as well. Otherwise you are more likely to snap into oversteer. If you just ran a stiffer front bar and a stock bar, you would make the car understeer more, which on a fwd is what you are fighting from stock. On some rwd's, people tend to run larger front bars to reduce roll and reduce oversteer.

I think what you are thinking about is that people say the front STRUT tie does very little on this car.

 

Awesome, thanks - so with a front sway bar, I should receive a reasonable increase with handling, because I'll be able to keep my whole car more stable without crazy oversteer or understeer

 

You wont want to just replace the stock fsb with a larger one. That will cause more understeer, which is the inherent issue already in a FWD. If you go larger with the front bar, you need a larger rear. Cars typically come with these days with the suspension tuned more towards understeer (safer for the average joe if they lose it in a corner on the street). The fwd layout makes this worse. So you either want to run a slightly stiffer rear bar only (TRD or Progress), or if you want to go a lot stiffer then you need a front bar to keep it from getting too prone to oversteer. That would be something like the hotchkis front and rear bar set.

What you sacrifice with stiffer sways is removing more independence from thes suspension, which can hurt a bit on rough roads, especially in the corners.

Its all about give and take