Oh, and I finally scanned my dyno printouts. Factory Pro dynos are normally 'heartbreakers' at the best of times, but a completely stock '91 USA-market bike with 59HP at the crank had dynoed at 49-50HP before, so I'm definitely down on power after the carb rebuild, installing the pod filters, and the Factory Pro Config 30 kit, which is not surprising given how rich it was running.
First off is with the stock CDI module. Unfortunately even when I bought the bike, it had a hard rev limit of 11,800rpm or so in all 6 gears, which equates to
exactly 180km/hr on the tach. I have a second spare '91 VC ignition module, and it does the same thing, so clearly the CDI isn't defective. Unfortnately all of my attempts to 'derestrict' the damn thing have failed, so my stock CDI dyno printouts end at ~12krpm.
38.57HP. Ugh. Stock is the curve with the higher power and ending at 12k.
Next up is the Chinese aftermarket CDI. Given that they only made the 'unrestricted' 59HP VC Bandit 400 for one year, I'm amazed that they actually make a legitimate replacement ECU from scratch. As far as I can tell it does properly actuate the VC mechanisms when it should, and it certainly does remove the rev limit.
... unfortunately, it also makes less power than the stock CDI does at all RPMs with weak 25-year old caps does, so it's not particularly helpful. Maybe if my fueling was spot on it'd be better, but at least from this comparison it's no help on the power front - it makes .2HP more when revved to 13k and 14k than the stock CDI did at 12k, but that's still not much help. It's the dyno run on the right that goes up to 14krpm, obviously.
Having said that, 91 VC CDIs are very hard to come by, so if someone has a bike that is completely dead and can't find a spare, I can attest that they definitely do work, although they make the bike considerably harder to start from cold as well. It was about $140 shipped direct from China from aliexpress, but they sell them on eBay too.