It's PCV, Positive Crankcase Ventilation, and the idea is to reroute the existing vacuum hose assembly from two fittings on the valve covers to another fitting near the turbo intake. If you're going to do this to a truck with 93,000 miles on it, I'd suggest doing the EGR block first. It's the combination of condensed oil vapor in the intake along with soot from the EGR that causes the worst gunk accumulation. There is some evidence that once the source of the soot is shut off, the oil vapors actually help cleanse the existing gunk from places you can't get to without disassembling and manually cleaning a lot of parts. Also, without soot from EGR, the oil vapors usually don't cause any problems. The slight suction on the crankcase helps reduce contamination from blowby. You may be better off leaving this alone. Elsewhere I've posted several detailed explanations about alternatives (and it usually brings the hair-on-fire types out of the woodwork), so I won't get into all the options here, other than to say that the real solution is the Parker Racor CCV4500, which is far too expensive for most people. For whatever reason, a lot of people feel very strongly for or against doing a PCV re-route, but you can be sure it's not going to give you much bang for the buck: rerouting the PCV will not gain you any fuel economy or longevity. Do the EGR block first, then put another 10,000 miles on it, and then check the gunk buildup if you want to.
Same end result. The blocker plate is a lot cheaper, and the end result still looks stock in a cursory visual inspection. You can make your own blocker plate from sheet metal using the gasket as a template. The commercially available plates that I've seen are thicker than they need to be (often well over 0.060" thick). There is limited space to work where the blocker plate goes (it's close to the firewall) so I guess the idea with the thicker plate is it makes it possible to drive it into place, almost like a wedge, but that also means you have to pry the up-pipe farther back too. The blocker plate can be made out of 24 gauge (0.024") stainless steel.
Is CTS a tuner shop, or are you talking about the Edge CTS display? If you re-program the ECM using EFILive by writing ("flashing") a new calibration ("tune") to it, you don't need an external tuner box like the Edge unit.
A lot of the more well-known tuner shops will not do DPF delete tunes any more (or at least they don't openly admit to doing them), due to the EPA's enforcement actions against companies like H&S & Edge. You can easily do it yourself though. There are threads elsewhere that explain exactly how to do it (PM me for the links). The other related thing to consider is that most tuners will only do 'locked' tunes, which means you can't make any changes yourself (neither DPF-related nor to anything else), and you are entirely dependent on the tuner shop for any future changes, even for something minor like tire size.
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