Welcome to the thread Sir. I understand your notion of interest coupled with concerns over the GREEK text.
But its not that impossible to understand stuff. Difficult....May be.
The product is a programmable chip. Like any other programmable hardware, you can take any function out of it based on your requirement. Some people focus on economy, some on performance. Others on responsiveness.
There is always a trade-off when one increases a certain parameter. However, for any vehicle one can always decide what gains and what trade-offs are suited to one's requirement. OEM's design vehicle control system best suited to the vehicle class. {Economy (fuel conservative), Luxury (more torque), Sports (more horsepower)}
But even then, out of thousands of similar produced cars, no two can behave totally alike. That depends on human/machine variances while assembling engine. Parts tolerances and how they were broken in as a complete package. in short, called stacking tolerances. For each engine to behave to its best abilites, the control system has to be fine tunned. (Not possible on large scale productions)
Originally these piggy backs are of purpose to accommodate the physical modifications done to increase power. For example, an after market turbo wont simply work with the stock ECU. The air sensing and corresponding fuelling requirements were not programmed in it.
However, the whole purpose of writing the thread was because of another reason. The fuel available here.
The vehicle tries to make the best of it and experiences problem (knock in this case). The vehicle then auto-corrects itself (knock retard) to such an extreme that the response becomes sloppy.
The key is to change certain parameters that the vehicle initially does not have to experience problem and should not auto-correct.
Hope this will broaden your understanding beyond COSTLY and INCREASED RESPONSE.