Exhaust Manifolds

Dan the man said

Myself, I probably wouldn't do a 340 /360 swap if I already had a 318. To do the swap there's the expense of buying the other engine, 360's are balanced differently so there's the extra cost of a converter LA 360's. The motor mounts are different than the 318's. I'm not complaining about the cost, just stayed what's involved.

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My point there's a huge group that thinks that way, I'm for 318 but you got to accept there limitations.
There's kind of two to main ways going about a build 1st seems to pick an peak hp and build for it and hopefully gear stall etc... For it, this is where most screw up, since most won't run much rear gear, rear gear is more important to smaller engines than larger ones.

Next is to build for a powerband and a street engine has at least two the performance stall to shift points and the average driving around part throttle one. When rpm is fixed then Torque is the only way to build more power, either through efficiency which there only so much room for improvements especially down low where everyone wants it, plus power is less sensitive to torque gains down low that they got to be fairly huge to make a difference, and since torque is hugely based on displacement that if you don't want to go larger than you got to accept what your gonna get, efficiency is generally an expensive and a lot of little things add up type of thing. A slightly modded EFI 5.2l magnum OD is probably the best you could expect down low from a 318.