Oh heck yeah, I agree with the scraping off - that's actually why I started lightly greasing paper & cork gaskets.
On Holleys, I hated cleaning up the old cork gaskets and went to the blue ones, and some guys spray PAM on them.

I once worked with a desert racer, who used some yellow stuff he called "gorilla snot" on everything - may as well have welded the motors together.

And yeah, a good sealing surface...just did a valve cover gasket where somebody had it rolled over the head's gasket surface, kind of like being pushed out by the fabbed valve cover.
Huge amount of silicone to, I guess, somehow trick it into sealing - which of course it couldn't.