I know it may seem very difficult to compress the shock, but that's not how the shock works when it's on the car.

The torsion bars are MUCH harder to compress, and they are what hold up the weight of the truck. When the shock works, it just controls the rebound created from the torsion bars unloading...so it's the *pulling out* of the shock that is the working motion, not the compression of the shock.

I'm sure you already knew this...but it seems like a shock is hard to compress sometimes. But when compared to the spring or the torsion bar, the shock is very easy to compress. It takes much more force to compress a spring or T-bar, so I would suspect any damage from an overly stiff front suspension would more rightly be attributed to the spring mechanism (over-loaded and cranked T-bars) rather than the shocks, since shocks aren't designed to support load on compression as the springs/T-bars are.

However, in this case, I think many people (like me) have cranked T Bars with no related front end damage. So maybe it IS the geometry change that's causing strange forces to wreak havoc on the front end parts??