When I bought the COBB catted/resonated J-Pipe I spoke to my tuner to see if an intake was worth buying before beginning the the tuning process. He said that it was but when I mentioned the COBB intake he cautioned to stay far away. He said the COBB intake was throwing MAF scaling all over the place and varied by upwards of 15% for every 2015/2016 WRX on his dyno. He highly recommended against it.
I then asked another tuner, who has provided sound advice to me in the past. He confirmed the same thing. Both recommended about 4 other intakes over the COBB one, for the same reasons you are mentioning in your post.
Sad to say, but it looks like COBB dropped the ball, this time around.
***Neither tuner sells intakes themselves, so they had no financial reason to sway me to one intake over another.