The valley reseal is something pretty common with M62TU engines, but not something I see attempted a lot during timing work. I figured with everything broken down this far it wouldn't be a lot of trouble to preemptively knock it out!
The hardest part about this job is access. The valley is sealed with a new plate so aside from access the only big job is cleaning everything. Especially the sealing surfaces, then torqueing everything to spec and re-assembling.
Oh yeah! One last memory I recalled that I wanted to share / advise against. 100% of the sealing surfaces on this engine that the previous owner was able to get to was lathered up with high temp / orange silicone based RTV. What made matters worse is that they didn't replace any of the stock gaskets / seals when they did their work years before. They just swabbed them with RTV and re-assembled. Luckily, they didn't get as far as I did, so in the end, only about 60% of the sealing surfaces I had to prep involved RTV removal. BMW doesn't assemble their engines with RTV!!! There are a small handful of places where gaskets meet at a right angle where BMW prescribes a sealing agent, but this was absolutely ridiculous! I spent hours cleaning off RTV :(