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I bought my VolksWagen Beetle for a lot of reasons. Most generally, I wanted to learn to take care of an engine, particularly an air-cooled one with simple parts; sort of like an airplane engine. I definitely didn't buy it to work on body work. One of the big things, though, was to understand how to maintain a carburator.
My auto mechanics teacher in high school said repeatedly that a carburator wasn't a magic box. And it's not the only thing in the engine that has to be precisely adjusted. However, I suspect that the reason carbs have a repuation of being fiddly is that their operation is dependent on the physics of fluids flowing through restricted passages. The flow rates that end up governing the running of the engine are very strong functions of sizes of thos passages, so very small adjustments produce very good results. I imagine it would be very easy to get to a set of adjustments where the engine won't run at all.
An of course, fiddling with it when it's running right probably won't help unless you do things in the right order. Which of course is what I was doing, without thinking about it, which is why the carb is so far out of adjustment. Argh. It was running a little funny (this is back before I decided to rip everything out in September) and so I adjusted the fast idle adjust screw to increase the idle and make things run a little smoother. Well, as it turns out, you don't adjust the idle speed with that screw.
Tomorrow, the procedure is: