I'll keep my thoughts to myself after reading the cam was installed dot to dot. To me that's worse than not knowing what your rear tire pressure is. I see 5 pages of guessing about ready to start.
I love reading through the stuff you've posted over the years - especially the latest on the Promaxx sbm heads. With that said, I get that you disapprove of the dot to dot thing. But it's easy for you sit back with 40+ years of experience and say that. I'm sure you've made your fair share of "rookie" mistakes long ago.
If you have constructive thoughts please feel free to jump in.
You didn't make a "rookie" mistake, you just made progress of your learning curve.
Degree'ing a cam is one of the checks you do to make sure everything is right.
I have only degree'd about 8 cams in 40 years, some were dead on, some needed a 2*-4* offset bushing to get them where I wanted.
There was one exception where the cam was so far retarded, I had to advance the cam a tooth and use a 8* bushing to retard it back! If I hadn't have degree'd it, the motor would have been a dog and I would have spent hours and $$$ trying to figure out why.
