In the last 18 months, I've done way more reading than I wanted to on EFI v. carb. I had to make the choice to spend the money to do the conversion on the TR8.

My car is a bit unique because the FI intake manifold is significanlty better than the carb one, which gives peak gains that would not be there otherwise.

Which leads me to my core point. EFI is not "magic." At the end of a day, and this is backed up by all kinds of data from muscle car land, EFI will probably not make any more peak power than a carb'ed car.

What EFI does give you is, at least in my case, more torque and far more area under the curve via being able to more precisely tune timing and mixture across the rev range.

Carbed cars can do this is "rough" fashion via messing with the advance curve and the neddles/jets, but it is always a trade off (better in one area of teh RPM than another, etc.).

But "old school" ECUs can be VERY bad. Mine in particular, which doesn't fuel over 4500 rpm on purpose and has a terrible stock advance curve for emissions reasons.

Based on this, for my car anyway, the way these things line up is:

"Open" EFI is significantly better than "open" Carbs which is WAY BETTER than stock EFI.

Where I am going with this is that I think many stock ECUs would actually be at a disadvantage to carb'ed cars wthout the ability to tune fuel and timing.

Make of that what you will. If we went back to stock ECUs, I'd have to ditch the ($15k) EFI conversion I did and go back to carbs.