lol, i worked at one of the mentioned subaru specialists in the article and the old "imprezas only run for 60k before a rebuild" is a myth!!!!
our demo car was running about 430bhp on the original 80,000 mile engine with no problems at all and i know of another tuner who runs a 500bhp sti still on it's original engine which he uses daily all over the country which had done 90,000.
the problem with the impreza engine is that unlike an evo or other performance cars it is quite a finely tuned engine and doesn't like being messed about with unless you know what you are doing. some people upgraded stuff like exhausts and filters etc without getting it checked for being happy like afr,det,correct boost etc etc which then can cause problems with engines going bang and other problems.
other problems were down to poor maintenance like having no oil in the engine or long periods without changing it. before we put a customers car on our dyno i always checked the oil level just to make sure and most were ok but we did have the odd one that hardly had any oil in it at all, so it's not the engine thats the problem it's the owner!!
i think the impreza in it's early years got a good reputation for being reliable and then when people started tuning them they thought they could thrash them everyday and they would be ok, but it's like anything mechanical in that thrash it everyday and eventually it will let go no matter what.
dont get me wrong, i'm not saying that the impreza is any better or more reliable than a gt4, i'm just saying from working on subarus for over 6 years they aren't any worse than any other performance car if they are looked after.