He's right....the advantage of coilovers are they are designed from the ground up to work as a cohesive unit. There's no worry of trying to pick a damper to match with a certain spring. All the testing has been done on the product, so you don't have to. Some coilovers can be rebuilt as well and the dampers themselves will generally last longer than a random spring/damper combo. This is what will happen if you ONLY put springs on a stock strut. A stock strut (whether stock, KYB, Koni, or whatever) is designed to work with a stock spring. When you lower the springs, the strut has to work harder to control that spring and the harder you drive the quicker it will wear itself out. By merely installing a lowering spring, you're compressing the damper itself when the car is not even moving. Then while the car is in motion and during aggressive driving, you're losing some compression/rebound characteristics of the internal valving. Here's a good analogy; you can get up out of your chair, walk to the fridge, get something to drink and sit back down relatively easily right? Now try it like this. Stand straight up, but bend at your knees so you're about an inch shorter and just stand there for about 5 mintues. Now try to walk that way. Do EVERYTHING that way. A bit more difficult isn't it? That is similar to installing a lowering spring on your car and the effect it has. With that said, lowering springs are not the devil. You will have less body roll and a slightly stiffer ride and plus your car will look cool!! And as far as it not "working" with the factory strut, well, you may not even notice it unless you're a regular track guy (you'd never see a track car with "just" lowering springs anyway). It's not a bad way to enter into the realm of suspension mods. Springs are relatively inexpensive so buy 'em, try 'em, and just know your struts will wear faster and you'll have to replace them eventually. Then you can sell the springs on ebay and move up to a coilover setup. The one problem with coilovers that I've personally found is while they are highly adjustable, 90% of the time you'll never adjust it once you find a comfortable setting (unless you're an avid track guy). However, for a street car, it's just too much of a hassle. Do you really want to get ready for a night out, get out to your car and say, "Oh ****, I need to lower it an inch, hold on." You probably won't adjust them as much as you think. That said, Tein's EDFC system is nice for at least you can adjust compression/rebound on the fly (you'll still have to adjust ride height manually though, unless you go with a full on air suspension). Another good one is H&R's Cup Kits. These are ride height adjustable, but the dampers are not, they're already valved for the specific vehicle, so that's one less adjustment you have to worry about, especially if you're not familiar with compression/rebound. And ride height adjustment is a bit easier mentally-speaking, it's merely up or down....not 2 clicks up from full soft or 3 clicks down from full stiff.....One last thing, remember the lower you go the harder it is to get a proper alignment. Most cars can be lowered about an inch or so and still maintain factory alignment specs. However, once you enter into the 1.5 to 2 inch range, then you're looking at using camber plates or other necessary alignment parts just to maintain a safe alignment that won't wear out your $800/set tires in 5000 miles!!.....sorry for rambling!!!!!!!!!!!