The "carb tuning 101" is written for using a wideband O2 sensor. If you are going to tune your own carb, you really owe it to yourself to get one. Reading plugs will give you an overall, but no detail. For an extreme example, you could be perfect on the primaries, plugs read good because that is where you run a lot of the time. But you could be lean when the secondaries are open and at high RPM. That would be a VERY bad scenario. Tuning a carb without an O2 sensor, or about 25 years experience in a race shop, is guessing at best.

Setting you timing is step 1 of carb tuning. Make sure that is good at idle and full advance.

If your idle is not right, everything could be off. All circuits add to the others. At WOT the idle circuit is still at work. The water up to temp may not be enough warmup. My engine takes about 20 minutes the really be settled in. Drive it around before you set the idle. Your rich smell in the garage while warming up is just the choke doing its job. I could be crazy, but I swear the packing in the FFR pipes holds unspent fuel if you are rich, which will stink up a garage for a while.

Once your carb is tuned, basically that is it, it is tuned, unless you change something in the engine, or move to 10,000 ft above sea level. I do find that my idle changes a little depending on outdoor temp and I am running hard, like doing autocross in August. If I touch the idle stop screw though, I end up putting it right back.