[jphughan]

I'll ignore the color switch factor here since a) I'm not a fan of black or white cars since both are too common and I think neither one shows off the lines of the car very well, and b) it's too subjective.

As for switching from DCT to 6MT, all I can do is tell you what made me get 6MT after trying DCT. First off, my driving rarely has me stuck in traffic, so that took a big advantage of DCT off the table for me, but if you have traffic then that's definitely a consideration. But having driven both, while I concede that DCT is at least as fun and maybe even more fun during harder back road driving and on the track because of the immediacy of everything, 6MT isn't exactly boring in those settings either. But 6MT takes driving that would otherwise be totally boring in DCT (e.g. city driving) and makes it fun, so I saw it as giving up (maybe) a tiny bit of fun on harder driving and the track and gaining a lot of fun on typical driving, the latter of which still makes up a decent chunk of my overall miles. And even though 6MT will never be as consistently smooth as DCT, there's a joy in always chasing that perfectly smooth upshift or rev-matched heel-toe downshift and feeling like a total hero when you get it exactly right. Plus I figure I have plenty of time in my life to drive great DCT cars, but 6MT's days are numbered, unfortunately, so I wanted to get it while I still could.

Is that enough to justify switching when you already have DCT? I probably wouldn't since I'd still have a blast in a DCT M3, and if I really wanted manual I'd probably use that as an excuse to get into a different car (lots of great machinery out there), but what I would do is irrelevant. What you do is for you to decide.