Stock 340 Manifolds or TTI Shorties?

Just a note - the cheap headers (I think they were Black Jack) I put on my Duster back in 1980 survived two years of street driving and 50,000 miles with the two low tubes only partially flattened.

A few years later, I put another set on my stepson's Duster 340. Took him two weeks to knock a hole in them. Muffler shop welded that one closed, but he kept beating on them and after a year, they were trash. I was gonna put manifolds back on, but he said, well, I know how to take care of them now. So on went another set of headers. Few weeks later, he knocked hole in the new headers when he absent mindedly ran over a fuel tank stub at a gas station. I didn't bother fixing it this time. Sold it next year, headers still leaking. This was after he moved out (with a little push from me). Of course when I went over it before selling it for him, I discovered the rough idle was caused by one idle mixture screw turned all the way in and the other several turns out. And the non-working radio was caused by him having cut the wiring I had put in, and just twisting the bare metal ends together where they would short out against the metal dash. And a few other equally dumb things (he glued a radar detector bracket to a mint dash pad). Oh, and before all that, he had taken it to the strip after I rebuilt the motor, and ran a full second slower than he should have, with 2.50 60 foot times (same as my slant six). OK, the last few things are only marginally related to the original subject, but it is true that how long a set of low hanging cheap headers last depends to a large extent on how clueless the driver is.