It's fixed!

Welp, whaddaya know. It was right under my nose the entire time.

It turns out that instead of replacing everything, I should have used a little more intuition. Felt retarded, acted retarded, was retarded. Apparently I didn't index my balancer correctly. When I was reading 12* initial, I was getting more like 4 degrees ATDC. My friend's father is a mechanic, and we were just shooting the breeze about the Nova, and we decided to take a look. Cranked the timing up a bunch, drove around listening for knock, and did some minor carburetor adjustments. I punched it at a stop sign, and all hell broke loose.

This. Nova. MOVES! now that I can floor it, that is

Thanks for all your help guys, I learned a great deal about tuning while trying to track this problem down. I'm going to go grab some timing tape, get back out the dial indicator set, and degree the balancer correctly. I'm surprised that the car even ran so retarded. When the #1 cylinder was at absolute TDC, the balancer was reading about 16* BTDC, if I remember correctly.

Again, thanks for your time and suggestions, there is much of wisdom that you can only get from the combined experience of this many people.