It's more than just weight. As end users we face some other issues too.
The big advantage of superstrut is it's ability to maintain constant camber throughtout the range of suspension movement and throughout the full range of steering movement
There's also another line of thought although it is purely conjecture. When a car is Homologated it's suspension is fixed. The superstrut configuration includes 4 pivot points which means that technically the 205 TTE could have used a dual wishbone setup in rally configuration
It's downside, as all ST205 owners know, is a complex system which while it doesn't wear particularly fast compared to conventional systems does suffer a significant drop in performance as this wear happens
Why TTE dropped it, nobody knows for certain. Well, I suppose the TTE engineers know but they're not telling us
It seems likely that they found little benefit from the constant camber setup but suffered heavy wear on the rutted surfaces which caused more bad effects than good.
Maybe they ran superstrut on tarmac events and McPherson on dirt. Again we the public can't really be sure but there are more photos of McPherson equipped cars than superstrut cars so it's reasonable to assume they gave it up for good
As to why Don gave it up, there are a few reasons reasons
Superstrut is non adjustable
Don's custom McPherson arms can be remanufactured reasonably cheaply to provide different suspension geometry
Superstrut is painfully expensive
You are always faced with the unfortunate possibility of contact with barriers and other cars in a race car. If you bend the superstrut this will be far more painful than simply replacing a lower wishbone
Superstrut is heavy
The full set of arms alone weight in at 16Kg half of which is unsprung weight. The struts themselves probably add another 5kg of purely unsprung weight. It's quite likely that Don's setup shaves 20KG of unsprung weight and 30Kg overall
Superstrut is inflexible
You are very very limited on damper choice for superstrut. Not necessarily a problem for a works rally team but a definite problem for John Q Public. Don's standard McPherson setup opens up a huge range of off the shelf dampers compared to superstrut which limits you to either TRD or TEIN setups (discounting BC and the like which are not or racing quality) and even these are very limited in race performance terms
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