I think that's the point though, to give power when you need power, and fuel efficiency when you don't. So everyone does do it, because its a good thing. I think you're making a mistake about what crime they're accused of.

The tradeoff between efficiency and power is ok, but what they did is have software that detected when an emission test was being run and created a fake engine profile that only made fuel efficient tradeoffs, and when the emission test stopped the engine went back to the regular tradeoffs.

That was their crime. They hid what settings they were really picking and specifically wrote software to defeat an emissions test.