I mentioned on a different thread a couple weeks ago about some innovations that improve performance are just an added expense at the end of the day. It essentially means everyone scraps their current parts and buys new ones, so any short term advantage is lost when everyone updates the parts. When Prock perfected the header angle last year, with in a few races everyone had them. Fun while it lasted, but the rest of the pack picked up the couple of hundredths they were worth. This means the advantage the team had was short lived, but a lot of money spend to keep up. Not a big deal for the big three with in house fabrication. However, the smaller guys had to spend thousands to keep up with technology, which eats in to there already limited budget. I would rather see a guy spend 6K on getting to the race rather than buying a set of headers.
I am all for as many spec parts as possible. It is imperative that guys like Bode, Densham, Diehl and such at least have current parts. What they do with them from there is where the magic is. The big budgets and top tuners will always have an advantage, but full fields and under dogs that can lay one down every now and then are important to me. There are dozens of teams sitting idle with 10+ year old technology that will stay parked due to the expense of updating their set up.
I don't look at it as restricting innovation, I see it as keeping the sport healthy. Even if nitro cars slowed down 2 tenths and 25 MPH, they would still be un-freaking believable!