The long version

Mitsubishi never federalized this for the US, so the entire domestic population arrived either through the 25-year import window or as a genuinely risky earlier gray-market job, and that filtering process alone explains why the buyer pool skews toward people who researched the car for years before they could legally own one. Values have more than tripled since 2005, steepest in the last five years as import eligibility widened, and the Tommi Makinen editions specifically have pulled away from the regular Evo VI on both price and how rarely they are driven. Flip Bait and Forbidden Fruit both describe a market that trades the car more readily than it rallies it.