I haven't read through this entire post, but I figured I would report the numbers I'm seeing so far with ~800 miles on the car.
I have a LT sedan with the 1.4 and 6 speed. When my wife drove the car 200 miles (mostly freeway) the HUD said she was averaging ~34MPG.
However, now with more miles, and 95% city driving, the overall average for the miles we've put on it is down to 27.8MPG.
I manually checked the mileage between fill ups and I got 24MPG.
I have been driving the car in an almost annoyingly slow manner in order to see improved numbers only to watch the average continue to slowly fall. Starting to really make me think I should have gotten the Honda Insight instead of the Sonic.
I'm hoping there is some truth to the whole break in idea, but I don't really see how that would actually be true.