A little more progress has finally been made.
Before sending the block off, I spent a few hours filing down some of the casting defects, chamfering holes, and deburring edges and what not, so after vapor blasting it turned out pretty nice looking.
I dialed in the rod bearing clearances at 0.0023-0.0024", and the mains around 0.0015-0.0016", and sent them off for coatings. Once coated, the rods should be around 0.0019" and the mains around 0.0011" which is on the low/mid range of factory spec and should allow for the coatings to "self clearance" as needed while still keeping the metal bearings themselves right where they should be. Bearing are sent off so should be back in a week or two.
I also ground another set of rods to match and balance them. The other set I already did got screwed up by the machine shop during resizing so the backup set needed the same treatment. In the end, the big end weight, small end weight, and overall weight are all matched to +/- 0.15g. In general it's pointless to get closer than maybe +/- 1g so I definitely got a little carried away.
The transmission side of things is starting to lurch along as well. I finally got all the pieces, and started sending them off for treatments as well. I'm not sure if this is worth a separate thread or not.
I started off by having a bunch of junk WPC treated. I'm not really expecting anything ground breaking from this, but its not too expensive and it seems like the long term benefits to fatigue strength and friction reduction could be good especially on things with lots of metal on metal sliding like forks, hubs, and shifter mechanism parts.
I had the whole gearset including final drive REM polished to a near mirror finish first though, to provide the best possible base finish for the WPC.
It's worth noting though that I opted NOT to do anything to the synchros. There's certain companies that seem to shill pretty hard for WPC that have published multiple articles claiming you should do this, but I called Synchrotech and asked them about it and they said absolutely do not treat the synchronizers.