Canned tunes “can” be reliable but not optimized. Every car is a little bit different… even with the same mods. But you can tune for the most conservative case and fuel, add some margin by pulling a little timing or adding a little fuel, and have something that is an 80-90% solution. The biggest issues I usually find with canned tunes aren’t reliability but driveability. That’s because low throttle points in the map tend to be more “finicky” in terms of providing a good feedback to the user. In other words things don’t feel smooth to the driver if you haven’t dialed things in pretty well across the entire map and the partial throttle areas where VE tables are moving around a lot tend to be the harder parts to tune IMO.
There are benefits to dyno tuning as well as street tuning. Personally I have always tuned WOT on the dyno just so you can easily see how the car likes changes you are making and then plenty of street tuning for trans and driveability. Since the TRX has a wideband built in, I’m comfortable with actually doing street tuning on the entire map as long as you don’t care about a dyno sheet.
