What are you working on?
Ostrich isn't the promised land for some. My experiences are less than stellar as with a SMEC the Ostrich will drain your battery. For a SMEC I would go with a remote ZIF socket and burn your own chips. This way you don't have to unplug your SMEC power wire when you leave the car sitting for more than a day or so. The only issue here is that there still aren't any good viable options for a waterproof housing for the remote mount ZIF sockets.
For LM cars you are set! No worries with battery drain and the whole shooting match stays nice and dry in the cabin
Tuning the stock computer using MPTuner and the like is okay but IMO it's not as straight forward as some may lead you to believe. It's not that you will screw anything up per say...but more that it takes a bit of learning and studying to get comfortable with what you are doing. For me this was mostly because the tables are not appropriately named for HP tuning. Once you get accustomed to what tables are called and what they do you can concentrate on what you should do. After that it's pretty simple.
To date I still am unimpressed with the SMEC cals and all those going forward. The LM cals just seem to be really good to spot on while the SMEC cars just don't seem to respond as well...for whatever reason.
There are lots of pluses to Megasquirt. One of them (although tedious) is replacing that 20 + year old wiring with fresh stuff. This is a concern for me as my car gets older. Also there is a huge community for Megasquirt enthusiasts. You can expand Megasquirt as your skills increase and go distributor-less if you like with a crank trigger and even coil on plug!...but most of all you can run wideband directly to the unit.
You will get a lot of nay sayers that will tell you to stay with stock stuff and give some pretty good reasons why. My advice is to actually talk to some guys that have megasquirt and are successful with it. Ask them what they like and what they don't and then weigh the pros/vs. cons.
It's your call as far as how in depth you want to go with your car. Do you want to be a back yard tuner or do you want something a little bit more professional? Will you be good with the limited expandability of tuning factory stuff or will you want future expandability?
Brian in 3-2-1....lol