^interesting point, but the corn debate i'll save for later.

one thing that im curious about, i was told years ago that synthetic oils do "clean" up the false seals made by conventional, but don't they in turn cause those false seals to also be remade from the synthetic? i noticed something like that with my 01 elantra i had years ago. after the first 2 changes that were made at 3k miles (due to minor leaking from false seals) they were fine. the car had 80k or so at the time when i made the switch.