Everyone needs to remember if your tuning gasoline you really need to be able to watch wot afr, tuning rich then pulling fuel back is much safer. I honestly havent seen an engine knock overly rich and I've Dyno tuned and strip tunes many over the years.
Under boost most engines make best power in the 10.5-11.5 afr BUT I've had several engines with high 12 to low 13 afr make near perfect pulls.
The water/meth can help an engine with preignition issues while making more power.
Engines respond better when air is cool and damp.
Thus the reason for intercoolers.
We had one of the 775bbc on Dyno and it was former pro mod engine, it was dual carb with massively ported big chief heads and 15.7-1 compression, but was spinning only 200-210psi on dynamic compression test due to camshaft overlap.
BUT above 4800 it had issues, we traced it to the engine detonating over gas quality. We installed a Snow water meth unit and tada the engine woke up and ran well even on down to using 89 octane. We tried E85 carbs but E85 in our area is so weak since they dropped the spec on E85 from E70 to E51.
The inconsistent nature of E85 is so bad it's limited value right now.
But on the Dyno I chose a conservative timing curve, then bring in the fuel till it tops out on power, then add a bit more timing then fuel and so on. We then keep working fuel and timing curve till we get best power. I also like to check about pulling timing for track tuning. If engine still makes power ok but bit less torque curve for bad tracks and such.
I had one customer that ran his car tuned back a bit, and kept the higher power setting for last ditch effort in face offs.