The less we know the faster we seem to go? (Murphy's Law Motors & Human Nature)

With the recent passing of my good friend Darrell McNulty, and some knee slapping phone discussions with my friend Ray this morning, it got me thinking about the last 20+ years and VW motors. Darrell and I used to have a lot of fun just "screwing together whatever parts" we had laying around (my ex boss called this "sweeping the floor") and dammit if every one of these hodge podge messes turned out to run hard as hell. Not that we didn't assemble them with care (well almost... one we had short-blocked in 40 minutes), but there was no "planning" involved. Not with these motors. We'd raid each others' cabinets and grab stuff. No phone calls to special order a certain tension valve spring. No waiting for UPS to drop off some special FK84 cam and matching unobtanium lifters. No wringing our hands in frustration at Bob's Giant Burgers for hours trying to figure out cam advance vs deck and valve/piston clearance. Used cam, but new lifters? Sure, go for it. That #1 thrust bearing still looks good? Run it. Most of these pushrods are same length... well six of the eight are. Put the shorts ones against intakes, they weigh more. Digging through coffee cans for rocker shims. Rifling through a box of opened Elring gasket kits for 12mm case o-rings. Yeah, not supposed to run 1.4 rockers on a W cam... screw it, bolt 'em on.
Why do these "shouldn't work worth a damn" motors run hard (or at all?) Ray and I kind of laughed about it this morning. When you don't know (or care), you're not overanalyzing. You're not second guessing yourself after it fires up ("I wonder.... had we pulled another .015" deck out of it...? What if we would have set the cam up @ 6 degrees advance instead of 4? Do the exhaust springs have enough travel @ .070" past CB?"). You have no real baseline to set your expectations. Just that the thing fires up and hits on all four is enough to celebrate. I also think, when you're not laying awake @ night, contemplating valve train harmonics and squish and ram tuning, you'll have a tendency to probably run things on the wild side. When it's "for fun", dropping an 86B in a 90.5 x 69 motor really doesn't seem so crazy after all. It's what you have, so you run it. Maybe it's a way to learn where the envelope can be pushed, and how far. While beating the life out of the motor, up past 7K, you're not in a psychological state of being 'at one' with every reciprocating part that's whizzing away inside that magnesium box. Some elbow grease and ingenuity was invested in these, but not much else. And, I think it shows just how tolerant the basic VW motor is for some basic, if wild, tuning.
Of course, these ratty rogue motors never did have the refinement or tightness the motors had that we took seriously and were built as a "system" instead of a stew of junk. Damon's 2276 was a "take no prisoners" effort and in the end, it made 213hp on street compression, sounded satanic and didn't drip a drop. But the hours involved building and checking and rechecking and ordering and modifying..... what happened to "fun?"