Low vacuum - should I ditch my vacuum advance distributor?

Your timing needs to be advanced, which is probably why you're seeing such low vacuum. Vacuum advance is important in street cars, so I would not get rid of it but simply tune what you have. You said that the timing is advanced as far as possible. Why can't you advance the initial timing a few degrees?
Well I probably can, but to get my total to 34-ish my initial will be around 20 with the current curve. Don’t seem to see much change in vacuum at idle no matter how much I advance initial