I hate to be the bearer of bad news but, if people are honking at you because they think you're on fire, your oil consumption is catastophic. A PCV system that is not creating a vacuum and is plugged will only help create oil leaks. The vacuum helps keep pressure off of the seals and gaskets. I say it's in the cylinders. If the rings were doing their job, the PCV problem wouldn't be able to get the oil past them. The mention of little to no smoke at idle would indicate oil ring problem since not much oil pressure or splash is happening at idle so little oil can get by the rings. When it picks up RPM is when the oil is really moving around in the crank case and it's when the smoke comes on. The sooty plugs are a symptom of this. It wouldn't be the heads since bad guides and seals would cause smoke upon start-up.
Without actually being there though, this is just an educated guess and a proper diagnosis should be made first. A better test for this would be a cylinder leak-down test. Since the engine runs, the compression rings must be doing something, so a compression test might not tell you much,
Scott
