Add more weight to a vehicle, know how it affects gas mileage, handling, and braking distances.
Add front and rear bumpers and prepare to compensate for added length.
Add a snorkel and understand that it bumps out a bit and you have to be more cautious not to hit it.
However if it was made too fragile, people would have complained. Sheet metal is going to give if you hit it as there is a void between snorkel and more sheet metal. More attachment points won't prevent metal from deforming if you hit it hard.
Carrying 9 engine filters would have been both cost prohibitive and silly for a place like Baja. I looked at engine filters each day, from the Raptors, Jeeps, and Tundra, and each day most of them became clogged to the point of being un-usable. Most shook them out each day to avoid replacing them entirely. We had sand deposits in the bottom of the airbox, but our air filter was pretty clean all things considered at the end of the trip.
These snorkels are designed and manufactured by a company who's primary customer base doesn't "wheel" recreationally, they use their vehicles to cross wide swaths of continents like Australia, Asia, and Africa, where the primary mission is to ensure the vehicle and it's occupants get from point A to point B intact. To say that people should be warned about this product inducing damage is like going to Calico and whacking your roof rack on the arch/squeeze, and declaring a crushed roof (which happens out there regularly) a sign that a roof rack is a damage multiplier. Anything is a damage multiplier if you hit it. My snorkel actually held my passenger fender together in a way that my driver side did not when I basically lawndarted my truck on the way to Guerro Negro.
You made a mistake, and got off pretty light by the looks of it thanks to a good PDR dude.
