American Muscle cars are fine, I somewhat respect them, I just hate the people that drive them and talk shit about imports. Although they would never tempt me over to the dark side anytime soon. All things concidered, Japanese engineering as far as I'm concerned have the best overall designs.
The sky does look nice theres no denying that, the front grill could use a slight facelift imo though. As for hybrids a Lexus GS 450h would be my choice, a luxury vehicle that does 0-60 in 5 seconds with a 4 cylinder's fuel economy, must be nice. Speaking of Lexus, they are comming out with a new 500+hp F1 based supercar that would obviously smoke these pony cars, could be interesting if not reasonably expensive.
My car also has a long hood, but its no pony car thankfully. I dont know how you (james) can go from a import to wanting a pony car so bad, I would definatley go with the STI easily (though the Evo is superior

) a stock lightweight, turbocharged, AWD, car with 4 doors is hard to beat. Throw in a boost controller and whatever miscellaneous mods you want and you should be making some decent speed easily beating any of those pony cars on a track and off the line.
Those new pony cars do have some appealing qualities to them, but as an overall package I dont see them as highly, of course many people interested in them arent looking at the overall package.