Success!
After a mammoth effort, Craig and I finally got the bastard in (again) after having the oil feed plate resurfaced and sealed with the correct sized copper washers - and it's not leaking oil anymore!
I'm now 100% sure that it was incorrectly sized washers as to why it was leaking the first time we got it back in. In future I won't try using imperial sized washers on a metric sized banjo...
Now I just have to bleed the damn cooling system - had a scare on the test drive where the temperature shot up then came back down before going up again... Obviously an air bubble, so will hopefully bleed that out tomorrow and go for a few drives.
All in all - I'd recommend the Hypergear highflow for a daily driver if you're not chasing numbers - just bear in mind that the Banjo fitting may foul on the oil feed adaptor plate and will either require a new fitting or the housing modified like mine. I'll speak to Stao and hopefully he can provide the correct fitting for future customers. The response is slightly laggier, but makes great midrange and holds through to the top end. Induction noise is also a fair bit quieter than my last turbo (albeit most likely on it's last legs when I bought the car) and coupled with the dump pipe and modified actuator it hauls a fair bit more ass than before. That and it's $400.00 minimum cheaper than the next available rebuild option that I know of means you can get the extra parts for the same price as another rebuild.
I imagine an (awesome) Nismo, Impul or Emanage would be pretty damn quick with this setup too
Anyway, time to go clean the blood off my knuckles because I was stupid and decided to do it all engine-in...
Sean (that simple dude)