I've read up on burr finish vs. smooth. At one point when grinding the S.V. I realized that you need to be pretty accurate to leave the burr finish especially around the edges. I have a good feel for how the burrs work now so I suppose I could go back and rough up the smoothed areas but I'm not sure I'd want to since I'm just happy that the intake is still usable.
To be clear, I didn't go as far as polishing the surfaces so I guess there's still some amount of texture. When I got the intake with the Hughes porting it essentially had the same finish as what I ended up with - not baby butt smooth but not 60 grit sand paper rough either. You can feel it with your finger tip. The smoothing only goes in a couple inches anyway so most of the runner is still 'as-cast' or minimally ground on without smoothing. All of the plenum is still as cast too.
Conversely, the ports on the heads are smooth from the CNC machining. There's certainly peaks and valleys from the machining though. Not sure if that is considered texture or not.
Don - I see guitar cases.