If you have the rest of the engine to handle it, cam, light reciprocating mass, excellent fuel flow and air/fuel distribution, correct rear gearing, etc., then you can curve the distributor to get full advance in quickly, say by 2300 rpm. Your compression ratio also has a lot to do with advance rates and total advance... A 10.0:1 motor with the wrong cam events is going to detonate like crazy with 36 degrees advance. A light weight car with tall (numerically) gears will accelerate hard with the same fast rate and high total advance, but it depends on a lot of other things in the engine and drivetrain. The total advance number and the rate at which the timing advances is a fine tuning method. When done correctly, it will maximize the performance potential of an engine.... But, if you put a fast rate in the wrong setup, the car can have a terrible bog, and the engine can rattle itself to death from too much timing coming in at too fast a rate.

The advance curve is nothing more then a fine tuning issue. Optimizing it and tweaking the rest of the engine is probably only going to result in numbers that can be seen on a dyno or a time slip..... On the street, tuning the advance curve in the distributor correctly can avoid detonation, but it has to be done too match the rest of the components in the engine and not as a cure all for low or poor performance.

In one of my sbf's, running in a 2400 pound 5 speed car on E-90 fuel, with 11:1 compression, I ran 35 degrees total advance with no vacuum advance and all the timing was in by 2200 rpm......and the MSD would start pulling some of the advance out at 6,000 rpm. This same setup in a heavy car on the street running pump gas would death rattle itself to pieces!!!!!