Amazing what a little timing will do for these old trucks ...

Dave W has a more aggressive timing table for the 7747 posted HERE..if your looking for even more performance...

1)..you want to use the averaged table for ve ..some hand smoothing will most likely still be needed as the spreadsheet tends to overshoot at times..and yes add ve1 an ve2 together as hammertime suggests as it will speed things up ....
2)..the patches don't need to be removed.
3)..yes you can enable egr and highway lean cruise when you get the ve table where you want it ,
personally I leave them off,as most of my tuning is more for performance then economy/emissions ...