Nice writeup, especially your take on which bar combos work for what.
As an added data point I snapped a brand W rear endlink in half. The thin bent ones not the super beef AL ones. Also the '02's have really weak rear mounting brackets, as you pointed out. I broke one of those too. Both ears where it mounts to the frame snapped clean off. A relatively cheap and easy upgrade is to replace the mounts with later model STi mounts. They're much beefier. This was only running a 22mm bar, BTW.