thomsbrain

Well, the cars that ride properly do, sure. Keep in mind if you're judging by how it feels to ride in the back seat, you're back in the position of mostly feeling one axle's movement, plus your heavy butt back there just dramatically lowered the rear ride rate (especially in front-heavy FWD cars that actually use very soft rear springs but still achieve higher rear ride rate due to the rear end being so much lighter to start with). Also, because they tune for higher unloaded ride rate in the rear but still need to achieve super-understeery handling, they have to use a lot of front sway bar and little (or often times no) rear bar, so you're still getting that "stiff front" handling reaction on turn-in. You can best use your butt-dyno to judge the ride rates by driving the car over a long hump or quick depression at freeway speeds. Crawling over speed bumps isn't a good test because you aren't hitting the bump fast enough.

Ride rates can really only be tuned for a specific situation. The engineers choose a target vehicle speed for the car to ride "flat," choose an expected weight distribution based on driver and anticipated passenger/cargo load, then choose the springs that will deliver a flat ride in those conditions. Any deviation from the "flat" speed or weight will throw things off and change the speed at which the car will ride flat (if at all). From what I've seen, your average Accord or Civic rides pretty flat at freeway speeds with just a driver.

It shouldn't change wheel rate very much at either end. We'd be talking about very small changes in motion ratio in a 1/4" of ride height change (which will be even less change at the lower shock mount). As far as roll rates, the rear roll center changes less through the range of suspension movement than does the front. All else being equal, raising the S2000 would move things very slightly in the direction of understeer.

I do expect you'll see an increase in subjective comfort by lowering the rear spring rates on the S2000, especially if you aren't changing valving.