he said that the carb was done by woodruff, which is known for putting out good work. and that the dyno operator swapped a carb they had kicking around, so you can extrapolate from that what you want-- and for me, that absolves any kind of carb issue; save for the mechanical operation of the carb on the dyno itself maybe hanging up or not allowing full throttle.
the cam is sus AF. they sent him the wrong one once, and then sent another. how'd he know it was wrong to begin with? who's to say the new one is right?
the engine builder is a wild card. to my thinking who in their right mind builds a bottom end and lets the customer install the cam? if you paid me for a short block build you're getting a cam and timing set installed, and degreed with a piece of paper that lists the cam specs and how it was installed (adv, ret, straight up). maybe he did good work, maybe the pistons are .040 in the hole and he was like: fool customer supplied these, might as well ship it and get paid, then just was all: yeah, the compression is whatever the mfg says it is.
then when the heads got snapped on somebody used whatever gaskets were available and now it's pushing like 8.2:1 compression.
anyway, to me, there's just a whole bunch of nebulous work and unverified, unanswered criticals floating around.