I think he was kidding about the magnecor wires being junk....
I have yet to see any real complaints about them from the rover group. In general for any make vehicle they've had a good reputation.
I've used NGK in my Toyota fleet, and NGK has always worked very well (though that's what's factory for them too!).
For what it's worth, I got bold last night and ran 1/2 bottle of seafoam through the intake again. Guess what??? Lots of smoke but no problems!!!! None! Yes, the check engine light came on because I almost killed the motor by letting the hose slip a bit out of my hand into the seafoam bottle, but other than that, no issues. I let it sit just under 15 minutes, turned it back on and revved it at 2500RPM until she started to smoke (A LOT AGAIN), and then took it for a test drive an drove it like I stole it, revving as high as 4500RPM. The tach goes to 6k, but I didn't want to push it. When I got home, I cleared the SES light, and amazingly after 18 miles of driving the light hasn't come back on. That's a first during my brief ownership of this D2.
I certainly didn't have any guys telling me to stay away from Bosch plugs when I bought them at Checker. All I got was a crabbie guy arguing with me that the leakdown testing tool I was trying to build was nothing but a compression tester (wrong!).
So, I'm going to cross my fingers for now and hope the seafoam is going to fix this problem. I haven't checked compression again after last night, but I'm wondering if it went up a little again on #6. It started out at 120, but it's gone up slightly after each seafoam cleaning (this is the 3rd time now).
Loving the seafoam and stock non-fouling champion plugs!