Casey,
It's tearing me apart that you are struggling so deeply with your conundrum. I'm more than happy to take the car off your hands to ease your pain.
I've been going through the same sort of thing with my car. The engine was rebuilt about 3,000 miles ago. If you take a look at my engine pic in the post I did you can see that the engine is nicely detailed and pretty clean. The carb isn't restored just rebuilt and cleaned up. Then you look around the engine and you see "patina" all over the place. Some people tell me to leave it alone, it's cool with it's bumps and bruises. Rust in my case is the problem. It doesn't stop and one day I'll have to take action to kill the expanding patina. The paint/body on your car looks awesome. I haven't seen an engine pic, so I'm not sure how dingy things may be here and there. If you're worried about it losing it's originality/patina, do a minimum detail and repair whatever needs fixing. Otherwise go nuts!