think of it this way... you have two 2-liter bottles connected at the mouth. the bottoms are cut off. pour water into the upper bottle and watch what happens. the mouths of the bottles connected to each other is like the first cat. you can increase the flow on the intake side all you want, and you can do the same for the exhaust side. but what's happening is a major bottleneck at the joint and no matter what you do to the ends, your middle section won't allow for any more water to go through than it's capable of. that joint is where the restriction occurs. remove the first cat (or replace it with a hi flow), increase the diameter of the downpipe, open up the midpipe, remove or hiflow the second cat, then all of a sudden, it's like removing the bottleneck altogether. then the only thing left out of the equation is the velocity of the water. this is where a 4-2-1 header or a shorty header, or whatever comes in handy. it will maximize the exiting gas' velocity, increasing flow. so there you have it.