That's what I thought, Todd. Glad to hear that you got it figured out and it works for you, but I'm confident that if everything was right with the old setup it would have worked just fine like that, too. I'm sure the nicer PCV probably made tuning easier, but with an engine that is in good tune and without problems, the stock setup should work fine--hot-rod or modified engines included. The real problem was that it sounds like air bleeds were plugged in the carb, which certainly will make it run like crap and blow black smoke! And you also loose tons of power running rich like that, as you obviously already know now.
From the sound of your oil problem, I'd bet that you got a spray-can "rebuild"/re-ring job, or that someone messed something up a little when they rebuilt it, which is depressingly common. It probably also burns oil, doesn't it?
Although the stock PCV valve may not be absolutely optimal with a tired or modified engine, it certainly shouldn't cause problems like you had. All my old tired engines have no trouble like that, and my father used to do a lot of hot-rod and racing stuff and never had problems like that.
From my perspective, it sounds like you got a dud rebuild that loses oil, and some of that managed to plug air bleeds in the carb. With the carb plugged, different PCV valves obviously didn't help any. After fixing the carb, you removed the PCV in favor of the oil separator, which didn't work as well and sucked a lot of air/oil. If I'm thinking about it right, the oil separator line was just a giant vacuum leak at that point, right? Then, you finally added back the PCV, although it was the special one at that point.
My bet is that if you drop the factory PCV valve back in at this point, the engine will run just like it does now. Whether it will stay cleaner with the magick PCV valve or not I don't know, but if the engine wasn't "sick" you wouldn't have any trouble with it.
Thanks for the in-depth reply, too. People will make claims like that all too often and never explain the situation that caused them to make them in the first place, which just leads to confusion and misinformation.
Keep on truckin',
"Sub"
