When you're going to $36k base price you can easily expand your options to include some pretty decently high end used cars as well and that can't be discarded. While you might have to make some serious compromises to buy a used Vette or Cayman at FiST money you have to make far fewer compromises on these cars at Focus RS money, especially when you consider, like you said, $36k is the base price and dealers are almost guaranteed to mark them up for the first year or two, then there is all the taxes and whatnot. Even without a single option, without a decent down payment, you're looking at $39k out the door since they probably won't haggle a car like this, but not including any potential market adjustment mark ups.
Regarding the options, they can keep all of them.
$1,995 on a "winter wheel" package? Hell no.
$1,990 on a forged 19" wheel w/ better summer tires? Considering I'd probably downsize to 17" anyway, super hell no.
$2,785 on the RS2 package for full leather, power driver seat, heated seats/mirrors/steering wheel & navigation? Not a chance. The base model comes with partial leather Recaros and I don't believe they are shaped any different so that's good enough for me. I'd miss the heated seats, but I don't use them enough in my FiST to justify the package because after 5-10 minutes they melt my ass and I turn them off. I'm fine with a manual adjust seat, one less electronic thing to break. Nav? I love having Nav, but all Sync 3 systems are getting a free upgrade to be Android Auto and CarPlay capable this year and that pretty much makes built in Nav a moot point if you don't mind using your phone for it instead (unless of course they hamstring some shit in there to only allow using CP/AA nav if you also have built in Nav, but if they did I'd just use nav directly on my phone and call it a day).
The base RS is plenty optioned and plenty capable and I see no reason to spend a dime extra on any of the available options.
