swaybars are over-rated.
if the sway bar is too thick and stiffens the car up too much, it does not allow your suspension to work independently (on s-chassis) meaning you will essentially lose grip.
The beefier swaybar in the front or rear will reduce body roll, and NOT allow the front/rear suspension work independently and will understeer/slide out easier. Just imagine if your car was driving on an uneven surface and if you had a really big sway bar in the rear, both wheels will be affected by that uneven surface BUT one wheel will have less traction because it will not be as planted to the floor because of the stiff sway bar.
Best bang for the buck would be suspension techniques. They use an OEM style endlink. Endlinks are a very important part of the swaybar because it is what holds the sway bar inplace. If the endlink has a weak design or has too much play (old bushings), the efficiency of the bar will decrease.
The width of the bar does greatly affect the performance of the sway bar because when you corner, it essentially twists and bends the bar. The less twisting and bending of the bar, the less body roll and increased rigidity you will get.
If you don’t plan on getting coilovers yet, i HIGHLY suggest you get some swaybars while running lowered springs/shocks. You will automatically feel a NIGHT AND DAY difference. Reason being is because the spring/shock combo is usually pretty soft compared to most coilovers out there and therefore, it will help with grip and not affect the suspension working independently as much as if you were running coilovers. With coilovers, you would in most cases lose grip with the added beefiness of front/rear swaybar and will not notice much of a difference of the addition of a beeft swaybar except for loss of grip. How I know? I’ve ran the same swaybar on both my spring/shock and now coilover setup. With the spring/shock combo my car felt like it was on a friggin rail road track and gripped HARD. With the coilovers, the back came out REAL easy when i had a beefier REAR sway bar.
All this is from personal experience (s-chassis) and not theories that i’ve read from someone else.
I hope this helped!!
For your situation, you could have turned down the coilover dampers to softer settings to compensate for the sway bar stiffness.
The point of sway bars is to eliminate body roll as well as TOO much independability of suspension. if you go over bump, one wheel goes airborne or gets less load and loses grip. The other will take the excess load and soon break tires traction. Sway bars solves this problem by keeping it less independent. But if too stiff, it’ll slide out a lot like Samson’s situation. So basically it’s trying to find the perfect balance between independent suspension and sway bars.