Actually, its usually the mechanics that are unwashed and the masses are clean!

__________________
1991 300 SEL
218,000 Km

"Xsbank's rules of mechanical intervention: Always go for the easiest solution first; 90% of what ails a gasoline engine is ignition; After that its all a WAG."

Is not adding resistance going towards the way of an open circuit in the secondary to some extent? The coil field no longer totally collapses as fully as the designers expected across the plug gap. Instead the remaining undischarged portion of the field discharges from the low turn primary of the autotransformer.
The designed discharge path across the plug is stopped too early by the larger amount of resistance in the secondary. The resultant inductive spike from the primary of the coil could easily take out a transistor. Or just overstress it till failure. You have simply limited the original intended discharge path to some extent with the increase of resistance in the secondary.

A little is within design paremeters. More resistance than the design paremeters allow for might be created by using the resistance plugs. The remaining field generated inductive type of pulse is going to hit the control module. The potential in that field has to go somewhere as it was not able to totally discharge across the plug as designed since the resistance limited that. If this is a given the manufacturer has allowed some capacity in his module to deal with reverse pulses unless the amount of the field remaining is producing pulses larger than design paremeters.

Might be interesting to have a look with a scope in the primary and see if that pulse is present if at all or larger with a resistive plug than a non resistive plug. It is getting late at night and I am tired but the above and I think it might be true is enough of a reason not to set yourself up. Critique my thoughts if you wish but to me with my limited intellect it makes some sense.
Basically my position is why play russian roulette with expensive control modules? Hunter brought up a valid concern. The thing that attracted my attention was the cost of the module if a good used one cannot be found. Just make sure you do not leave the possible cause of the failure still in the circuit before using a new one if you ever have a failure.
This is also probably why newer replacement ignition wire sets have in some cases lower reistance than the originals had when new.
If a balast type of resistor is in the primary coil circuit. If this resistor increases in value with age the car might still run okay but the ability to partially filter or moderate any pulse coming out of the coil primary is getting reduced as well. The car battery is used as a capactor as well in this circuit and increasing balast resistor values are further reducing any pulses to some extent from its filtering effect.