i recently B6 A4 1.8T come in running 6-8psi maximum. turns out the car has some sort of APR GT2871 kit on it. kit appears to consist of a new manifold, turbo, downpipe, turbo inlet pipe, diverter valve, FMIC setup, and the car has the APR exhaust. was shocked to see that the car had no MAF on it at all. tried to read the ECU which did work and i got an APR tagged file out of it. i than opened the ECU up to inspect a little closer to discover that it has an APR daughter board soldered into it thus why i could not flash over the file thats in the ECU. anyhow i did not know that APR ever provided a setup like this let alone MAFless tuning. has anyone ever seen this before?

Personally im not a fan of MAFless/alpha-N tuning so im putting a B5 S4 MAF back on it and retuning it from scratch.

The less parts you have the faster you go 

Maybe they didn't. The ECU is in permanent alpha-n since the maf is unplugged and the owner thinks its awesome.

Depends on the board iirc; some first gen ones could be read via bootmode, then later, iirc, it would feed garbage thru bootmode.