2007 Mazda 3 motor swap from 2.3l to 2.5l

Fun stuff. Jake got the idea to swap a 2.5l into his 2007 203K mile Mazda 3 rather than purchase a car in today's times.
He did a ton of research and got a used motor with over 90K miles and a used 5 speed with around the same mileage. He put a bunch of new parts on the 2.5 including timing chain, cams and basic refresh of the engine (didn't pull pistons etc).
He did a great job and that included getting headers, a new 2.5l intake and a few other items.
The swap went very well with most of the 2.3 parts moving to the 2.5. Of significance is the AC unit which required us to move the 2.3 oil pan, and pickup to the 2.5. This allows the AC to mount in the stock location on the car.
Overall things went extremely well except the fact that the used 5 speed tranny was broken out of the box. Either the diff or input shaft is compromised and we could not get drive from the setup. Murphy's law kidded in since things were going too smoothly. We actually had the car back together fairly quickly, even taking out time but had to pull the tranny out and swap in his original version.
We did few extra items, new a-arms and sway bar bushings and I had to do a bit of surgery to the driver side sub-frame. The a-arm bushing locked onto the a-arm bolt and we could not get it out without cutting the sub-frame and rebuilding it. I cut the head off of the mount, then cut the bolt and finally got things apart. After welding on the hat back onto the sub-frame, things resumed to a more productive effort.
Everything from there work fairly nicely although it did take us 1.2hrs to swap out the sway bar bushings (man those are in there). Hard to get to...but we WON!
The rest of just details, exhaust work and although that went well, after putting all things together the down pipe bracket hit the cross brace in the car. After some tweaking there we got that clearanced and all was good.
All things going well, we started up the car and it ran very nicely, smooth and with lots more power than the 2.3. Car felt awesome.
We weren't done yet...the motor mounts were junk and 1 tie rod needed to be swapped out. After all that, we had 1 axle seal give it up so we had to swap that out also...
The rest was burping the coolant, bleeding the clutch and doing a quick alignment on the front end.
Overall, fairly easy swap, lots to take out and put back in but the result is very nice. Jake seems to be enjoying it and the car drives 100 times better with the added power.
He did great on the homework and the main efforts to get this done. We still have to re-bleed the clutch - it ain't perfect yet, and need to research an O2 issue from the header (minor stuff). Car runs strong!
It was fun hanging out with my boy....we did great together and did a great job! Kudos to Jake.