...and here is #4 where I drilled the additional oil feed hole directed towards the valve tip itself and tapped the top of the rocker arm feed hole with a @#4-40 machine set screw.

Really hard to see this until towards the end where the oil is getting splashed up against the valve cover walls (dark spots on grey background)...

4) rocker @ rev using modified oil feed passage

All in all, I spent good amount of time "studying" the oiling process the other day. Here are some things I noticed:

1) the as-is top oiling passage provides a good amount of oil to the whole rocker arm, I suppose maybe the oil itself takes away some heat as well from the rocker arm body??? Not quite sure here, but certainly @ idle the rocker nose seems to be oiled well

2) the modified oiling provides massive amounts of oil to both the rocker arm nose as well as the spring itself...I would imagine this must be particularly good for the spring because in that situation it will actually cool the springs and certainly there is no doubt in my mind that this provides for a better valve tip oiling

So at speed (rev up) how can I tell that one is better than the other?

Well, I put on a couple of hrs worth of driving, just local stuff, with a few red-line (6500) shifts. I ran these using the lash-caps. Upon disassembly I found that the modified oiling side showed almost no wear on the caps, whereas the as-designed side did in fact start to wear.

I did notice that the wear pattern on the lash caps was still off towards the exhaust side of the valve, which indicates my geometry is wrong. So as best as I can tell here is my stab at the actual ROOT CAUSE (full analysis from late last season to now):

1) I measured the pushrods and arrived at 7.017" EL in preparation for the Crane rockers
2) I ordered these from Smith Bros
3) I setup the Crane rockers but found a few of them caused intereference between the pushrods and pushrod holes in the heads
4) since pulling the heads (last season) was not an option I used the rocker shaft shims to move the shafts "up & away" to get enough clearance in the pushrod tunnel in the heads
5) this caused the rocker nose sweep to move too far towards the exhaust side, which now caused the valve tip to be heavily loaded on that side in a very limitted surface area @ top lift - probably the worst combination possible from perspective of longevity
6) as-designed the Crane rocker oiling process may not have provided sufficient oiling given the situation described in #5 above, the modified oiling process appears to be able to handle this however, so that is a good lesson-learned

Now there may very well be other problems that may be contributing here that I am simply unaware of. That I simply can not tell at the moment. However, since my goal at this point in time is NOT to start investing in parts which I will only get one more cruising season out of I am going back to my 1.5 CompCams roller rockers. Given the amount of wear I experienced with these Crane sweep rocker arms it is hard to argue the fact that the rollers are a better solution for my combination.

More importantly, I know for a fact that the roller rocker do give me a very narrow valve tip sweep, almost idea I would say. The only worry I have now is whether the two valve tips which have some of that wear will cause a problem for the roller rockers. I will monitor closely.

Big thanks to all of you guys, feedback was greatly appreciated!