Not knowing the tech’s level of experience or the exact symptoms you had. Nobody can say. But given how this job was probably presented to him it could easily have been much more than 3.5hrs.
He/She was given a engine that had been replaced and had never run. So it’s possible that the engine had been assembled wrong. Maybe cam installed wrong, maybe valves adjusted wrong, etc. Next is a lot of work has been done by someone who might not be qualified. Maybe plugged A into B and B into A, and burned out something in the ECM, etc. On top of this a part or parts have been replaced with non OEM parts.
Years ago I had one that took me almost 5hrs. Customer had replaced the long block and now it would start and die, start and die. He and his buddies had replaced a lot of parts. I can’t remember exactly what the original problem was but it was something that would have taken less than a hour to find. But first I had to find out out that during his “cleaning” of the two ECM connectors (someone on the internet told him that might be the problem) he had mixed up the green with white tracer wire with the white with Green tracer wire and got them in the wrong spots. I was proud I found it. He was upset with how long it took me to find “something as simple as two wires mixed up”.
You ask ask if the crank sensor will show up in the software. You have the software, did it? Most likely not. That’s one of the problems with aftermarket parts. They often will work—— kind of ——- just not right. It’s possible in your engine the crank output didn’t agree with cam sensor output and confused the ECM.
Now on that you have the Rinda tool I highly recommend that you spend a few hours scanning your engine while it’s working right. Spend some time looking at the numbers while it’s cold, hot, running, stopped and especially while under load at all different RPMs. It will help you in the future. Maybe even swap that $25 crank sensor back in and see what you see.
