Aluminum cylinder heads
Yup... go with known power adders that I believe everyone here can agree with. Disregard what you read about hipo stuffs.. you are not going to be toooling around town or on the highway at WOT. You want to buy components that will improve those driving conditions. Better exhaust/headers, intake & carb, ignition, as noted earlier.. rockers. IIRC the stock stamped vary from 1.45~1.47 ish. A true set of 1.5 rockers is actually a decent improvement over stock. None of the above breaks the bank on it's own and you can do on your own reasonably once you get the parts collected. Any one of the upgrades is not dependent on another.
The aluminum heads, roller rockers and intake I just put on my 360LA were wayyy more than the bottom end and mild cam merit. But I plan to stroke & upgrade the cam long term so it made sense and the new combo is actually very streetable once dialed in. If I were not going to stroke it later a decent redo on the cast heads would have sufficed.
GL!