The recommendation to drive for a week IS to get a "feel" for the tune. You've just paid good money for it, so you need to see how it runs before you start doing things to it that could actually diminish its effectiveness. In my case, I found the custom tunes to be more "refined" than the "canned" ones, which I liked. And, I had asked that my tunes be optimized for economy and found they seemed to improve my gas mileage by about 0.5 mpg over the canned ones.
Some people have complained they don't seem to have as much "power" as the canned ones. Bill has said he has to balance a performance increase with factors that could impact engine and transmission longevity. I'd like to think he's learned a few things in the past few years and has adjusted his tunes accordingly (he's largely responsible for the "canned" Edge tunes too), so, that might be what those people are feeling.
Once you have completed your first tune WITHOUT opening the Custom Options menu, the settings Bill has used for your tune for things like shift points, timing, etc become the "default" settings you will see when you open "Custom Options" in later tunings -
except for TS and GR! TS and GR ALWAYS load "placeholder" values when this menu is opened. The GR is often correct, but the TS is usually the smallest TS that was offered on your model year truck. So, the FIRST time you open that menu, check and SET both TS and GR. Then, on all subsequent times you open that menu, "Load Previous Settings" AS THE
FIRST STEP!
The "previous settings" file is actually changed when you open a menu item, not when you program the PCM. This means that if you open TS
BEFORE "Loading Previous Settings", you will put a placeholder TS value into the previous settings file! This makes no sense, I know - but, I've confirmed this is the way things work with my own Gryphon.
The whole process is very confusing, to say the least. I can only guess that the TS (and possibly the GR) are things that a truck owner can easily and frequently change, whereas shift points and timing and so on stay relatively "fixed" during the life of a truck.
Still, it's not the way I would have coded this process.
The new CS/CTS programmers seem (as far as I can tell so far) to have taken a more logical approach with custom options. But, they have more memory capacity and perhaps that's what makes this approach possible.
- Jack