Your points are well-taken. I have no doubt the math makes sense on a racecar. You lose a little tiny bit of throttle response and power and you gain reliability. It's also a spec engine putting out gobs of power with insane throttle response, so the damper hit is hard to feel in the first place, and no matter what it does to your power you're going to tune the thing right back to your desired spec horsepower or whatever. On a plain stock engine, the throttle response difference is notable (and I suspect, a reason for my perception of felt changes in upshifts on my new block - revs just aren't falling as fast).
Your random data point about 40-80 hours is interesting as well. Using very approximate, rounded-off, numbers, my stock engine had 40K street miles on it before it left the street for good, and ~4K track miles on it (I had mis-estimated this as more like 5K earlier on). Those 4K track miles occurred over the course of approximately 80 hours of track time (The rough figures I'm using for easy approximation is 40x singular days of DE, ~100 miles over 4x 30minute sessions per day).
Keep in mind this block was sealed up at the factory back in late 2008 and never opened or worked on again. That it survived this long was a miracle (and maybe thanks to religious maintenance where I could on things like regular high-quality oil changes, and the baffled oil pan I picked up from AM Performance, and good cooling). I really think the flywheel flopping around is what did in the crank bearings at the end. Had I thought to check that and correct it earlier, the engine might've gone longer. Still, something had to give. I highly doubt I'd have made it to 10K miles no matter what I did (well, short of actually rebuilding the block before it fails).
Which brings me around to the situation I'm facing now: how to adapt to and cope with where I'm at in my ever-evolving hobby. If I keep up with anything like my current schedule of DE events and expect engine failures at about this sort of interval, I'm looking at a dead engine block every 2 years if nothing goes unusually-wrong. It's tempting to say "Yeah but I can't afford the time or labor cost of having the engine rebuilt correctly on regular maintenance intervals", but that's probably not true. If I don't, I'll be doing the same rebuilds but with less predictability and more downtime. Of course there's all the other components to keep track of as well. How long do good-quality spherical bushings last? Shocks? Rear ends? Transmissions?
Figuring all this stuff out from scratch the hard way is a trying experience at best, given I'm a one-man pit crew with no qualifications to speak of and doing this for fun with no sponsorship dollars or any real plan to go after real racing (I'm closing on 40 and started too late in life to ever be good enough for a top-tier race series, and I like my well-paying day job).
While all of the above sounds pretty depressing and daunting, in many ways it's kind of awesome, too. In the same way that track-driving stretches my skills and my brain in painful but ultimately rewarding ways, so does all the rest of this stretch me in other areas. On the days when it doesn't totally defeat you, it feels pretty awesome to still be doing it at all
