Well, in the past week I found that I had my fuel during crank leaned out too much. During the Des Moines trip I was again unhappy with my crank times, so when I got home I went back through everything and recalled that my Edelbrock guy had mentioned one day that my crank fuel was "...considerably leaner than their curve" so I loaded in his values as a test and it helped a lot. My mistake had been making adjustments in crank fuel immediately after shutdown, as opposed to finding the "sweet spot" for a given ambient/coolant temperature, and then letting the car sit for a while before trying it again at a warmer temp. It makes sense that immediately after shutdown there is still a lot of residual fuel/air in the intake, which is just waiting to be sucked into the chamber and ignited. After sitting a while, which is the normal use situation, the fuel vapors have dissipated to a very large degree and more fuel is needed for a quick start. Where I thought my engine was flooding, it was really wanting more fuel for lightoff. Bottom line, my whole battery "issue" may have been driven by me screwing up the crank fuel adjustment trying to "optimize" starts. I like having the bigger battery for potential problem times and I think that it keeps my system voltage a bit higher during crank, but I'm not sure that the little battery wouldn't have done the job with the crank mixture adjusted right. That said, I'm not willing to spend the money to buy a new 680 size just to test the theory. Just wanted to say that the little AGM's may well be OK for just about any application. Lots of guys are using them. Consider this an advertisement for "self tune" EFI systems or the problem of old engineers with too much time on their hands