Degreeing a cam

Most I degree in are pretty close but one time I did a 454 for a buddy and he had a gear drive installed. Guess what, it was 16 degrees off!! Can you imagine how that would have ran (if it would have ran at all)?

The way I feel is if your going to spend a bunch of money on a bunch of high perf parts to make your car faster why would you skip a very important part of the build that could potentially cost you some of that horsepower your trying to gain