The ACME car was George Bowland's old sucker car at one point, right? That car strted life really wide and short to accommodate the suction skirt, and, yeah, I do remember KJ and Marshall basically turning it into a more traditional truss framed center section.
I think Milligan and Cheng's car is even more radical on the track/wheelbase ratio. But, yeah, I totally get what you're saying about selling out for one part of the friction circle or another. I think when everyone jumped on the turbo 2-stroke bandwagon then it became a contest of who could use all of that newfound power first.
My other favorite historical A Mod arms race was the high aspect ratio wings back in the '90s. It was kind of before people had realy figured out how to build multi-element wings efficiently, and a dual-element wing was a big deal, and people realized that with limited square footage, a high-aspect ratio was a more efficient use of that square footage. So you got all these A Mod cars with super wide glider wings that they had to space up above the cones. Pretty crazy stuff.