Everything above sounds right ......
Here are my 3 most important questions:
1) How and where do you plan on driving the vehicle? 2) Where do you need / want the power?
3) Do you like to tinker with your vehicle (make all those nice little modifications over time), or do you just take it to a shop for any repairs?
Ford powerplants in general:
Ford has done a pretty good job in the performance area. The industry and Ford has changed a lot. Ford is going kind of full circle. They used to make a limited set of engines and adapted them to different applications (vehicles). For the last 25 - 30 years however they made a variety of different engines unique to specific applications - The cologne 60 degree V6 being one of these series. The result is that there were never enough of these to unique power plants to provide a viable market for the after-market manufacturers to produce performance parts. Many tried, but it just didn't work.
The old standby power plants such as the 302 and 351 have been around for a long time, have changed very little. The number of vehicles with these engines is very large including bith cars and trucks. The result bing an aftermarket that could thrive producing performance parts.
Today Ford is going back to these roots, mostly for manufacturing efficiency, and building the "modular" engines. These engines will displace all the "unique" power plants such as the OHV and SOHC V6 we have in our Explorers. There are already a host of performance parts for the new modular engines.
You will NEVER see a real performance after market for these engines. There simply are not enough of them. Fortunately they were designed very well and stand on their own. But, this is not very satisfactory for those of us that like to "tinker".
If you want reasonable performance, off the shelf. You don't want to tinker very much - maby CAT back exhaust, MAF, chip then the V6 is a great engine. There are also some SuperCharger applications for those of you that want to really boost high end HP - excellent on the street.
If you want to tinker with your car and build a specific kind of power curve for the track or the trail, and need a choice of parts such as cams, lifters, pistons, intake and exhgaust manifolds as wellas all the other good stuff then you can't beat a 302 (5.0), or the new modular engines.
By the way...
I still expect that the SOHC V6 will beat my 5.0 on the street and on the track. Put us on a hill or on the trail and things change. Also, because you make a bunch of mods to your engine doesn't mean you automatically get performance. I have seen many people make the wrong choices, or do inferior work and lose performance instead of gain it.