I'm new to owning a "pickup" consumer/commuter truck, but I've owned commercial cab and chassis (45xx/55xx) trucks for years, and many diesels. I've just never been into cosmetic only mods like most lifts/leveling, and never had an interest in them. So when I purchased a used RAM with those cosmetic mods I wanted to get rid of them, as they made the tuck worse for my needs, mainly towing, and the ride at 80+ mph bouncy. I don't waste my money or time researching mods that are purely for looks or worse reduce capability. Its just not my cup of tea to make my truck into a costume to look like I have a tough off roader, that I can't / won't actually ever take off road as I don't want my paint scratched. So I was asking for help/insight from the folks who would know about leveling kits so I could get it removed. Personally I think leveling is a waste of money as its just for looks. Want a used level kit?
If you do a thought experiment about what it actually takes to modify the engine code..... It starts with someone who can crack the encryption the manufacturer has put in place to protect their code from tampering/reverse engineering/copying and modification. Such a company would have to have deep pockets to build a GPU data center, or rent one from AWS to hash out / crack the encyption and have the expertise to crack encryption (not a common skill among mechanics). Once the encryption is cracked, do a rom dump (mechanics can do this?), perform a disassembly on the code, reverse engineer the code (they won't get the code comments and have to figure out how it works). Then write modifications to the manufacturers code to allow "maps" and other common modifications like disabling check engine lights, torque / speed limits, emissions disabling, and anything else you can think off. Then they write a software package to make it simple for a "tuner" to change certain engine parameters to their taste, along with some pre-defined base maps to help the tuner get a product out as soon as possible. Next they have to perform validation testing to verify they can deploy the new code and it works. So they would have to have an engineer on staff who understands the specific engine to write base maps for distribution. Next, this company would write encryption tools and etc. so that other tuners / consumers can't steal their work.
Does this sound like something a mechanic who became a "tuner" would be able to do themselves, while trying to make money on working on customers vehicles? Most people don't realize the level of expertise in Computer Engineering/Software engineering it would take to reverse engineer and modify a manufactures software. Finally, there is the expense.... If you have coders making 150K/yr (google pays an average of 300K), decryption servers (10's of thousands plus expertise on how to build one) and etc. You'd want to sell this package to as many "tuners" as possible along with licensing fee's to distribute the cost. (I own an IT company) it might take you a couple of 100K to pull this off or someone who works for free. Plus you have to provide support to the tuners. So you'd want to sell this to as many "tuner" companies as possible to distribute the cost of you investment over as many sales as possible. The good thing about this is it can be very profitable. Software has essentially 0 manufacturing cost, so selling 30K units costs very little for distribution, its all up front cost.
As for tunes, its generally the same on nearly all platforms, VW, BMW, Ford, GM, etc. I'm just commenting that in general there are very few companies out there with the ability to modify manufactures engine code. Sometimes like on BMW there is an opensource effort..... But in general the market is always the same case on every vehicle I've owned. There is generally 1 sometimes 2 companies that have the expertise to understand the code in the engine computer. They "the software development company for tunes" then create a base map and software tools to allow "tuner". The "tuners" add their marketing and maybe tweak a few of the maps. But since generally all tuner shops are working from the same software package, tools, and base maps, what a "tuner" can get out of an engine will always be very similar. The rest is marketing. Why is the Cummins market different than any other engine market in terms of tunes? Its not likely that it is.