OK, got some pics to hopefully help answer some of the questions.

1) here is the full rocker arm shaft, stripped of the rocker arms, showing the home-made banana groves


I removed all the rocker arms off of my roller setup as well and compared the shafts side by side. Exactly the same configuration, oil passage holed drilled in the same spots, etc, etc. Is that maybe part of my problem? I do not actually have a factory (340 TA???) shaft handy to compare these to, and if the ductile iron rockers are supposed to be fed somewhat differently that maybe be part of my root cause?

2) this section shows the shaft blueing I mentioned, I think this is heat, yes?


3) finally here is a close-up of a couple of rocker arms, you can see that the direct oiling hole is right smack in the middle of the oiling grove that is machined on the inside of the rocker arm body, this I would expect should feed enough oil to the top oiling hole as well as the pushrod cup hole


I decided to modify the rocker arms to close up the top oiling hole and will drill a separate oil hole to squirt oil into the rocker arm nose as well as a into the pushrod cup. This happens to match the configuration I see on my CompCams rollers and the stuff my MP Engines book shows.