JDubya

If you want the manual version of the car for all the right reasons, then buy the manual version of the car. The CSC should not be what deters you, in my opinion. Like you noted with your examples, you can go to probably any car forum and you'll see a common issue pop up. Some are worse than others. I'm sure you know this, but owning a car and exposing yourself to the potential mechanic issues just comes with the territory of car ownership. If you worry about every little issue that each car/brand has, you'll never buy anything you want.

I think bartly said it best when he suggested that maybe there should be a thread for people who haven't had CSC issues. Not a lot of people come on the internet to create threads to say "hey my car hasn't had X issue!." You're only going to see the threads from the pissed off people who have had issues.

Granted, it seems pretty clear that the CSC issue on the Z seems pretty common with respect to the various things that go wrong. However, I'd love to see the actual percentage of CSC failures charted with the mileage during the failure. We'll never get this data, but it would be nice to see, because I bet the failure rates with respect to mileage aren't as frightening as they seem.

With that said, I don't think anyone here is going to deny that the CSC design is complete garbage. If it bothers you that much, there are some fantastic alternatives to the stock CSC from Z1 or ZSpeed.

TL;DR: Buying the manual Z isn't an automatic "my CSC is going to fail in 10k miles!". Plenty of people haven't had any issues, some people do have issues. If it fails, oh well, warranty or buy a proven replacement. You'll just regret not buying the manual Z if it's the car you really want.