360 Questions.. pardon my ignorance.

Forget about the vacuum advance for now. Plug the damn port and get a base tune up in the poor thing. Then worry about vacuum advance.
So what’s your basic method then? It seems everyone has an opinion on what’s “correct”.

Carb is set to a baseline 2.5 turns on the idle mix screws, idle speed screw is set to achieve a square transfer slot. Initial timing is 5 degrees at 650rpm (on the last step of fast idle cam, shop manual calls for TDC). Once it comes off that cam to regular curb idle it wants to stall unless I give it a little throttle.

So where would YOU go from there?