Unrustle your jimmies. Heritage styling element or not, my point is that I think they look tacky on an otherwise clean and understated looking coupe. The overall styling on the '04 was subtle, not at all shouty, a high performance coupe that you could still manage to fly under the radar with. The dual exhaust was an improvement, but I think it went a step backwards with the facelifted hood. Do they even feed any air to the intake or similar cooling, or are they similarly non-functional like the scoops on some of the classic muscle cars as well (I think the original GTO had the hood scoop in a low pressure area)?
I’m of the opinion that the car would have been more successful if they didn’t call it a GTO. Maybe kept the monaro name. They are great cars, and they shouldn’t have decided to bank on a legendary name from their past to sell them, because as we’ve seen above, doing that has baggage associated with it. In general though, cars don’t need to scream “Look at how fucking racecar I am! Look at my fucking scoops! Look at them!”. Sometimes less is more.
TL;DR, go drive one. If you like it, awesome. I think they are awesome cars regardless of what the marketing department decided to call it.