While mods like what you did often look great, the car manufacturers really do take the time to make sure the car is not only safe, but liveable as well. I also am on VWVortex and on those forums I see folks who are planning to do all sorts of visual, lighting, suspension, and performance modifications to their cars, some of them BRAND NEW.
These upgrades provide performance enhancements on some levels, but also seem to make other aspects worse. For example, your lowered ride height looks awesome and perhaps improves handling through a lower center of gravity, but also makes the car hard to live with on a daily basis as you have to slow down for just about every speed bump and you have to negotiate driveways at strange angles, pissing off people behind you trying to get out of the way of oncoming traffic.
Not necessarily limited to VW's, but I see lighting "upgrades" that sometimes are worse than the OEM ones. The biggest ones are tinted taillights and sometimes even headlights: WHY? You've just made your car harder to see at night/poor visibility conditions by other drivers. Same goes with limo-black tint on the windows; good luck trying to back up at night unless you have a rear camera, which is not always a good substitute for turning your head around and looking for yourself.
At least ECS was willing to take them back, and you only made a $2400 mistake rather than a $2900 one.