Ok, I have finally gotten around to trying to sort this out, partially because the car decided to do a great deal of my debugging on it's own when my ignition coil died as a dead short. I suspect this slowly dying ignition coil to have been the cause of my loss of power. In regard to my bogging down while accelerating when cold I felt like the engine was running too rich as I could also smell fuel until it got warm. Armed with that thought I found this article which seemed to describe my symptoms fairly well.
I cleaned the contacts for the mass air flow sensor with electrical contract cleaner and haven't had any trouble since. I should note that before cleaning the contacts, they looked perfectly fine. Evidently they had some kind of film or oxidation though as it has so far eliminated the problem completely.

I did see a surprisingly light woven ground cable going from a lug on the coolant rail at the back of the engine back to the block. It didn't really look like a sufficient mechanism to ground the engine block, I think I will replace it and add a couple of grounding points just to make sure everything is well grounded.

On a sad note, when my ignition coil went out I didn't have the proper wires or tools to connect the spare ignition coil with an external ballast resister. Long story short, what I could rig up by the side of the road had my 6 volt coil at 12 volts. On the upside, I made it home, on the downside it took out my radio. No other damage that I can find and the proper parts are now installed.

Overall, the car is now running great! I miss my radio though. I can't even get to the thing so far, but I'll pose those questions in a new thread as they are kind of off topic.

Thanks all of you!

 

The main ground strap is under he car, RH side, right where the engine and transmission come together


Cheers
DD