A ton of space? Like a few cubic inches in areas where it's completely irrelevant, and no weight savings to speak of
Cleaning up the appearance and creating space to work with is important for streetfighter builds because you don't have body work to hide the clutter; and yes, it saves at least a pound, I forget the exact amount I weighed, not a lot but when trying to lighten a modern track bike there are no big lumps of weight to hack off... it comes off in a lots of small amounts that add up... as Yoshi pointed out.
... and yes, COPs can give a hotter spark. Any time your pushing 60K+ volts through a wire there are voltage losses, longer the wire and higher the temperature the more loss, especially as the wire ages. Is this significant? Depends on the person...
Virtually all modern sport bikes have COPs, don't they?
Agree with Mr. Yoshi!
But, and this is my opinion, I am quite sure industrial designers have the "can this be improved somehow" genes. They look at one element and see room for improvement. In this case improvement is also an improvement when the Mr. Bossman of -insert your favorite brand here- says, hey, great idea Mr. Designer dude, we saved xxxxx amounts of usd on shipping thanks to your compact, low weight sparkie thingy, AND we now sell more of them as a pure bonus!
I'm NOT saying cop are bad, but I surely did not change many coils before cop came along...
[emoji27]