Thanks guys for the replies. I also forgot to mention this, as I look back on my post, this part is probably important:
It can "sometimes" hold an idle. It idled for a good 5 minutes straight yesterday, no stutters or rises or falters.
But, half or more of the time, when it's idling ok but then I twist the hand throttle to rev it back up, it has trouble going back down to the idle it was on before the throttle-twist.
It's not 100% consistent. It's one of those intermittent things. Sometimes ok, but sometimes not; and sometimes WAY out of whack to the point of me wondering if I'll ever dare ride this monster on a highway if it's gonna act so random like that (I picture an 18 wheeler riding my tail behind me, another one on my left in the passing lane, a guardrail on the right and a braking dump truck in front of me and this bike picking that exact moment to decide it's time to rev up to 1500 rpm in 5th gear...). Sorry 'bout the drama but you know how scary some riding scenarios can become in just a flash of time.. so I have to fix this or I'll never ride it -- too dangerous, I have kids to support.
If I remember, Patton replied to one of my earlier posts and recommended pulling the air screw plugs and removing/cleaning them; and I never did that step. I think he also might have recommended measuring the fuel level (not just the float height) and I didn't do that, either. I think I'll remove the carbs (again,,,) and do a second, more thorough cleaning and will inspect the diaphrams even closer.
Related: Tell me about synching the carbs.... I figured that since I never disassembled the carb bodies from the 4-rack system; and since I didn't touch any of the butterfly valve screw settings for any of the carbs -- well that meant to me that i didn't UN-synch the carbs. Then i figured if i didn't UN synch them, there's no need to re-synch them. That's probably a bad assumption isn't it.
I don't have the fancy vacuum tubes and all that stuff to synchronize each carb. I tried that once back in 1989 when I put dual Mikuni 40mm sidedraft carbs on my little Suzuki Samurai mini-Jeep, and a friend who had the synching tools helped me measure & balance the airflow through each carb to get them all equal. I don't have those tools.
How can I synch them without proper tools?