Information on the 273

The Poly was a great engine but it was physically too big for the smaller cars coming out in 63. In fact, the 63's couldn't even fit a V8 in due to the firewall design. If they didn't design a new head they wouldn't be able to put a V8 in the mew models. There is a lot of similarities between the Poly and the LA engines. Heads and valve timing are the biggest differences.
Smart move replacing the poly with the 273.
lMO.
You can actually make a case for the Poly being a better head than the LA. I don't want to derail the OP's thread too far, but in a nutshell; the Polys were individual runner, straighter ports, better valvetrain geometry, and a polyspheric (some call them the "semi-hemi") combustion chamber. The width killed it for A body use (as previously stated), and higher manufacturing costs caused its ultimate demise. The LA heads were really just a compromise design to get a wedge head on an existing block architecture, and inherited all kinds of weird geometry issues and port compromises in order to make them work- but they've been the standard for sixty years now. Who knows where we'd be performance-wise if the poly heads had been getting some lovin' for all these decades instead of the LA heads... just food for thought.