Halo, sorry, wrong on two counts:
At WOT, D, S and L do behave differently. Put the car in D and floor it and the motor will jump up to the mid range and then slowly climb as your MPH does. If you push it over into S, then the RPMs will leap up towards redline much faster giving maximum acceleration sooner. L goes even further, giving you maximum acceleration and engine breaking without any lag for pulley ratio shifting. I would not recommend driving in L for long, it's not really healthy to peg your motor at near redline for such a long period of time, but it's absolutely brilliant on a cloverleaf freeway interchange when you want to balance the car on the edge of traction and then get maximum power from WOT to launch out of the corner without any lag at all.
Now then, on the subject of the "kick" you get from shifting from L or S into D at high RPMs. That is the tranny shifting ratios as you lift off the throttle, which means as a consequence it's trying to slow the engine down, which means you get a huge dump of rotational inertia from the motor into the drive wheels. You don't actually need to do the shift at all, you can floor it in D, wait a bit for the RPMs to climb up to redline, then lift %90 off the throttle and feel the car surge an extre few MPH faster. Kinda disconcerting at first until you get used to it, but then it's kinda fun :4: .