UPDATE:
I had a similar problem and replaced my o2 sensors and all was fixed. The passengers side basically clogged up on me meaning failed reading properly through certain rpms at certain throttle pressures. It all started when I put on my frpp manifold as well and the car just freaked out on me i guess and the o2 sensors went out lol. So I just replaced the rear 2 and all was fixed. The front 2 I have off becaue of my long tubes so I didnt worry about them
Could it also be in the tune for the o2 sensors? Meaning like maybe they didn't make the tune aware that the o2 sensors are moved further downstream, thus causing an issue with reading exhaust flow correctly especially at certain rpms?
This is pretty much exactly what it was.
Kudos to Lito actually, in the very first set of datalogs I sent to him, though highly insufficient as they were, he noticed my cam angle wasn't changing. I brought it up to my tuner that the VCT looked like it was locked in the tune. He remembered in one of our many tuning sessions we had locked VCT out in an attempt to add/remove timing and fuel combinations. We turned VCT loose in the tune and did a couple pulls, it seemed to make things worse. The cams were advancing (at least, I assume the closer you get to "0" in the tune is advanced) towards 3k/rpm and the wideband was registering lean/rich spikes in very short intervals. Just for testing, my tuner decided to throw 20% more fuel into the entire tune. My idle was 12.5 and any throttle was pretty much pegged 10.0 but I'm sure richer. The popping went away, completely.
From there my tuner wiped out the tune files and started from scratch to exactly what the car should need, but this time gave the tune a more retarded cam profile at 3k/rpm. The car would still pop, but like 80% less than it did prior. We did a few datalog runs at 25%, 50%, and 75% throttle through the 2200-3400 rpm range and found the narrowband O2's were screwing us hard. For some reason the O2's were commanding more and more fuel at 3k than what the tune was calling for, but no timing was being pulled.
My tuner put the car in open loop and rewrote all the fuel tables and cam angle. Car ran flawless. No spikes, no backfires, absolutely perfect. I also used to have a startup issue on cold-starts after the car had sat overnight, the engine would rev up to 2800/rpm and sounded like dogshit as if it was backfiring the whole way 'til it warmed up a bit. Now it starts up at 1400/rpm and idles perfect. I also had an issue with idle surge/crash when coming down from gear, I'd be rolling the gears and say I was at 2500rpm and let it go to neutral, the rpms would fall all the way to 350 and then surge back up to 1100 and it would go back and forth like that until I came to a stop, then it would idle fairly normal. Now I can let out anywhere and the car drops to a perfect 850/rpm idle.
So it was a problem in the tune, but also a problem with my O2 narrowbands. I'm going to get a new set of O2's and see what happens when the car goes back into closed loop. But I gotta say, with the car running so good in open loop, I dunno if I wanna fvck with a good thing LOL.
Thanks Lito for getting the ball rolling! Will update again once I get some new O2's. Can't believe those things were screwing me up that bad this whole time.