318 2bbl won't idle without choke

Glad you found something going on and it turns out @AJ/FormS was right on about your timing. It’s definitely hard to get a good tune on a carb with the cam timing all over the place. I also agree with @Phreakish that I would slap a timing set on it and run a compression/leak down test to see if it’s worth moving forward. I wouldn’t pull it just yet. But based on the amount of sludge in your pic, and the results of the compression test, I would at the very least drop the pan, clean it and the pick up screen before buttoning it all back up. And if I did get it running and was not planning on going through it, I would do more than a few oil changes in the first couple thousand miles.