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I haven’t seen much evidence that shorter springs = more damper wear and think it’s mostly a myth tied to the quirks of the 90’s car scene. There were two main factors there -
(1) Cut springs. First and foremost, that reduces the total available suspension travel. Second, if it was a progressive spring (which they usually were) you’d be cutting off the portion of the coil with the highest spring rate. Put those two together and you’re going to get two conditions that are killer for a damper - riding the bumpstops at full compression, and lack of droop travel under extension. Both ways, what ends up happening is that the spring no longer supports the weight of the car and those forces are put on the damper. And they’ll crack, leak, etc.
(2) And then there’s the heavier than stock wheels and cars that were common back then. Almost all of the wheels back then were gravity cast, so if you were upsizing and going wider, you added ridiculous amounts of unsprung weight. Also the tuning scene then was about goofy fiberglass bodykits, lots of heavy electronics, etc. One of the factors in the harmonic damping equation is dependent on the mass of the sprung and unsprung portions of the system. So you’re adding a bunch of mass to both back in the 90’s, it’s going to work your dampers a lot more at weights they were never designed to work with.
So yeah...I believe in BMW and Dinan doing a good job with their products, and most of the premature wear warnings for dampers are just from us being their hardest and most demanding users and conflating that with the real problems of badly lowered cars back in the day. So I’d say ride it out with the stock dampers for now, then be prepared to go to the aftermarket instead of to BMW when they do eventually give out. Unless you’re really wanting to upgrade the dampers anyway. Then just do it now and enjoy.
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