Not sure why you've heard of failures, I've never had a problem in a lake flat or a drag hydro, beat the crap out of both of them without missing a beat. Don't mount the box on the engine or near heat, put it on vibration mounts somewhere else like the front bulkhead or under the seat maybe. And no, you can't run the distributor and coil as a stand alone. The distributor puts out a signal to the box that fires the coil. If the MSD box has a white wire you can fire it with a points distributor but what for? Go with the MSD, you will like it just fine.
DJ