A lot of folks run below 200, and you will from time to time, but as long as you're not trying to race an entire gallon in race conditions at like 110F, you shouldn't be going through pistons/sleeves because of it. Perhaps your air filter was letting fine dust in? How was break-in? Perhaps your needles were fighting -- if you have one needle over rich and one over lean, you can hide a lack of lubrication at times because your temps will seem normal due to the cooling effect of the over rich side of things.

As an example of needle fighting, the first time I had the b5 out, I had the low end set too rich and the high speed set too lean. I was used to tuning an OS motor and the LSN of the b5 has a larger range of rpm between normal off throttle idle speed and the fully loaded up idle speed, so I had artificially set the low end mixture rich and the high speed lean (to get desired acceleration). The motor seemed fine for the short bursts on the street, but when I got to the track, something wasn't right and on the box that two bursts of high speed made the second burst (where it was already cleaned out) cut out from being too lean when you got on the throttle. This let me know there was needle fighting going on. I quickly re-tuned the HSN from boggy rich without letting it idle much, then re-adjusted LSN and idle speed -- I ended up a good quarter turn or more richer on the HSN with the same performance and temps, just without the patchy lean condition. When the patchy lean condition hit, the motor was starved for lube, but the low end was rich enough that it kept the temps in check. If I hadn't caught it, I would have probably ended up with no compression after a while as it was raping the piston once the motor cleaned out on top.

Food for thought.