Help with Head Gasket selection

OK, if the deck heights are in 1 to 8 order, then yeah.... the pattern seems to be the deck being short in the middle. Is that Starrett straight edge stiff enough? I found localized dips and bumps that cover a wide area and a top-to-bottom slope. You could swap some end to middle piston-rod assemblies and see what happens, but if you really want to know, take one piston-rod assembly and check it in all 8 holes.

BTW, I have seen similar grooving on the throws of a straight-out-of-the-original-engine crank; never thought it was anything but factory machining....??? Never checked how deep it was.

And FWIW I have .020" tip difference between intakes and exhausts on my last Opel head. That came about because I asked the machine shop to set the new bigger valves in the heads to where they were just enough in the heads to have proper seat angles, but not any deeper so as to not have any added obstruction to low lift flow. So that is where the valves ended up. I just accepted the difference and shimmed the valves close. (But it is not a high lift situation either.)