This is why my favourite thing in life is hanging around people smarter than me.
Tribology is certainly relevant - and a tractable problem, because it relies as much on empirical data as theoretical, and probably moreso.
Rugosity probably less relevant, but kinda more interesting, because it looks like a maddeningly difficult problem to tackle. I really want to dig into the etymology, because it sure sounds like a rug is a perfect example of the problem: We know what the area of the rug is. What is the surface area of all of the rug's fibers?
(Back to the problem at hand, though: Started bolting the 3.0 back together tonight, and without doing much to one of the heads - we did a careful cleaning before maybe ten minutes on the emery board, and it handily meets the .002" flatness (warp) spec. A couple of the intake valve clearances were a teentsy bit over, but not enough for me to want to start screwing with the lot. We'll move on to the other head tomorrow morning. Oh - one other thing. I thought it was a good sign that the Mahle head gaskets listed the COO as Japan, but it's better than that. They have the Fuji Heavy Industries logo on them.)