@1970rusty - I don't know you, your project goals or anything, but I did spot something you said. Without anything else to go on, I am initially agreeing with your machinist, that you should stick with a carb. The reason is that you are paying someone to assemble that engine for you, rather than take a challenge to learn how to do it yourself. That's fine, but is the only indicator to me that you may not be the type to invest in learning more or developing skills in order to install and tune your own stuff.
That's fine, but tells me you could use a basic carb or expensive self-do-everything EFI and give it a shot, but you will possibly just ask someone else to do it for you. At that point, and depending on your project goals, that would likely be a carb and your machinist's recommendation for tuning. I don't mean to sound presumptive, but it's one way I look for clues for a good fit, and only one clue. Just my 2-cents not knowing anything else about you. 🤷♂️
The same goes for others too comfortable with what they know or have. That's fine, but there is little motivation to explore stuff or methods that may be better, quicker, cheaper or whatever. Those are often the personality type to cuss at what they don't know or diss other options rather than motivate themselves to learn new ways they might solve whatever issue is in-front of them quickly. For them,
anything outside their comfort zone is a poor fit. Lots of personalities lead to lots of options—and opinions about them.
