Well I got the bad Speedmaster taste out of my mouth

It that the real issue or was it the port location was jambled. The holes all line up with a gasket but the port common walls don't. At least that's the issue with mine.
Yes that was the issue and no longer an issue since it was fixed. The casting hasn't changed, the final machining did and that is when the mounting holes are machined (drilled) into the manifold. The foundry had the wrong tolerances in the machining profile which caused the holes to be offset. The engineering team tightened up the tolerances and modified the profile. They implemented all this between production runs without much time lost. More importantly, because it was addressed so quickly, the affected manifolds were limited to 1 batch (lot).