Sweet! Thanks for the feedback guys, and yes, I was in heaven all day. It's especially sweet because I know there have already been a few times when the project has seemed like a daunting amount of work. This makes me feel like it's finally attainable. I'm not sure exactly what compression was, but mr6pack bob recommended 9.5 to 1 and I fed that information onto my machinist who built the engine with me.
As far as the carb, I had opened it up and it looked freshly rebuilt, but upon putting some pressure into it (before starting obv) we found a couple of small leaks and replaced a couple things using the kit i brought (thankfully). Other than that, when we got the engine warmed up using the other known good carb they had, we put mine on and it started up immediately. On the dyno it took these guys a total of like 3 minutes to tune the mixture using the RPM readings, and there is no metering block for the secondaries on the 6191 carb, so the tuning was very easy. No sniff test though and i'm sure when i get back to california i'll have to adjust it a tad (i'm currently doing the build in Iowa).
@Chryco Psycho - We used both their new style Holley and the original carb I had, and we looked at the curves side by side. Both carbs operated almost exactly the same with the exception of the original 6191 carb being just short on power because it had a bad vacuum secondary diaphram. In my kit there was a new diaphram but it had an eyelet on the end instead of the chrysler only diaphram with the elbow on the end (that I ended up having to find at Daytona Carbs in Florida), so we did change the diaphram, but it was a hair longer and we had to rig it onto the carb, so my expectation is that the carb performance would be 95% the same. I was surprised. BTW the new one we were using was a 80670 Holley with 69 jets in front and 72 jets in the rear.
Torque here i come!