Me, I'll defer to you on that point. I believe you, but I was always able to make the traditional-type carbs (Carter BBS/BBD, Holley 1920/1945, Bendix-Stromberg WA3/WW3) work well and I sorta see the Webers as a black art I'm not really interested in learning (that may change once it becomes completely impossible to get a good factory-type carb any more). I understand the Webers are very highly tunable, but that also implies having to do a lot of tuning (spend a lot of time fiddlefutzing). One thing that puts me off them from the practical standpoint is air cleaner unavailability: those dumb little rectangular K&N "filters" do an okeh job of keeping spiders and rocks out the engine, but as far as actual dust and dirt, they're lousy (see
here and
here—"After only 24 minutes the K&N had accumulated 221gms of dirt but passed 7.0gms. Compared to the AC, the K&N plugged up nearly 3 times faster, passed 18 times more dirt and captured 37% less dirt").