What would make what I would consider an interesting episode is to take one of these previous underwhelming builds and do some old school hop up mods to get the numbers up.
Take that 350 Pontiac, put in a bigger cam, pocket port the heads, different intake manifold, etc. something other than just putting a set of edelbrock heads on it.
Maybe rework the stock heads, then install the edelbrock heads afterward to see how much better they are.