Romer said:
Hell, why not take the shroud off and see if what they are saying is true.
The 80's cooling is overkill for the needs of most, what other car or for that matter truck holds 4 gallons of coolant. Can you remove the shroud and have it work, yes many have on many types of vehicles, because you can get away with it doesn't make it better. If your cooling airflow system is comprised, removing the shroud may improve over the comprised system, but will require lots of mods and careful engineering to equal the performance of a properly functioning stock system.
To get an idea of what I am talking about lets look at how the system works. This maybe old news to most and I am not an engineer, but will try to explain it so that maybe some can make sense of it?
The coolant enters the top tank, (the thing that we lean on when working on the truck

) It functions as a distribution manifold, the coolant spreads out and greatly slows down. Then flows through the cooling tubes into the bottom tank, a collection manifold, where the coolant from all of the tubes is mixed and pumped back to the engine. A unit of coolant only flows through one tube on each pass through the radiator, it's only chance for cooling.
In the tube the coolant gives up heat to the metal tube and air flowing past the tube and it's fins remove some of it. It's simple to measure, touch a temp probe to the top and then the bottom of a tube to see how much heat is removed. For this argument we will call it 200F in and 160F out and the tube is 14" long, or about 3F of heat transfer per inch of travel. With even airflow all of the tubes perform close to the same and when mixed the output coolant is close to 160F.
Now we remove the shroud and for the sake of a simple argument put on a 14" contact type fan and assume that the truck is stopped, with no additional airflow. The tubes centered to the fan are fully in the airflow and perform the same. The ones half the way out on the blades are only under the fan and getting good airflow for half of their length, so they only give up 20F of heat, the ones further out on the fan are even less cooled and the tubes in the other 10" of the radiator that isn't covered by the fan aren't getting any airflow at all, so hot coolant is just squirting right through. So when all of the coolant from the tubes is mixed in the bottom tank the output is more like 185F.
Yes this is a simplistic overview, even with no active airflow there will be some cooling due to convection, etc., the front tubes are more efficient than the rears and a bunch of details. The point is to think of a single pass radiator as a collection of individual cooling units (tubes) working together. Then the importance of even airflow to each tube, no matter how you get it, big fan with shroud, bunches of smaller fans, ram air, etc. becomes apparent for maximum cooling efficiency.