I have an idea, but never actually bothered to buy a copy of the book... Does anyone recognize this? If you look closely at the chart, the rocker changes are specific to only the outboard cylinders; the footnote I found w/ the chart indicated the rocker changes to the inboard cylinders resulted in losing power.

I vaguely remember a Circle Track mag article where they tried swapping rockers on a SBC. They tried all sorts of combos and did find improvement when the end cylinders were different than the middle ones. Sometime in the late 80s....

That chart is from one of the Chevy Power books. Chevy used to make those books every few years (like the old Direct Connection bibles) but I don't think they printed a new edition for a quite a while now.

Yeah, that's what I suspected. There was an older copy of some Chevy-specific publication on the book shelf at a semi-local speed shop that had an article on this stuff, but I never actually read it.

I would have expected the approach to have been putting the higher ratio rockers on the INBOARD runners, since what I've seen from flow bench testing bb Mopar intakes is that the longer & less restricted outboard runners typically flow better.

Questions raised by this graph:
a) Does the same thing apply to typical sb Chevy single-plane intakes?
b) Does this indicate that the increased dry flow of the outboard runner is offset by the additional wet flow frictional losses caused by the longer runner?
c) Am I freakin' lost in the theoretical clouds?

To me it just sounds like a imbalance in the intake
and they covered it up with the rockers. If they
had EGT's in all of the pipes it might have shown it

That was a NASCAR engine they were working on and for some reason it liked higher ratios on the outboard four cylinders. When they put the higher ratio rocker arms on all eight cylinders they lost power.

The difference was only 4 hp so they were really looking for tiny gains. I've never even been on a dyno where I would trust a 4 hp difference as significant!

c) Am I freakin' lost in the theoretical clouds?

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It sounds like you're snowed in to me