Small Blocks

I believe that a 9.200" deck height was mentioned, the only way that the 360 could be is to have a shorter connecting rod, otherwise the compression height would be really short. Also the 360 couldn't be stroked to a 408 as the compression height would be less than 1.300". Either way I totally disagree with a shorter deck height especially by .400.
Not true at all. 9.2-6.125-2=1.075. Plenty of room for a metric ring pack in a stroker with a less expensive 6-1/8 Chevy rod and a lighter .927 piston pin. Look at some of your SBC race and even production LS “hockey puck” slipper skirt pistons that don’t even have an inch of compression height. Just because these engines came from the past doesn’t mean we have to keep superseded technology in them to try to go fast… however, I’d also like to state that the simplest reality of why we do have a lot of things we’d like to see changed in the LA design is because the retrofit and modification to the LA design was done with the least amount of tooling changes necessary to keep the short term profitability in check. I’m sure that the engineers (William Weertman especially!) who worked on the project never imagined the design would be around long enough for it to be developed into the later update of the V6 and magnum variants. If engineering had known beforehand how long the LA was going to be produced for, it’s probable that engineering would have implemented some of these improvements in the original redux of the A platform. A shorter deck height would have paid for a lot of tooling changes over time with the reduction in iron use.