Thanks again, all.

Yes, I do have the Gordon Hutchins PMK, bought via Photographer's Formulary. I have a sense that the film I'm currently using, being Bergger Pancro 400, has a soft emulsion but this is only a vaguely informed guess on my part. Does anyone know where it is actually made? By Ilford, perhaps? I actually really want to shoot the Adox CHS 100 II for its look, but for the life of me can't find any in sheets.

Anyway, back to tray processing. My good friends who are very much masters of this stuff keep restating to me that tray processing single sheets is very problematic, siting turbulence at the edges of the sheet that create streaking / areas of higher density. I'm not sure how this could be any worse than with multiple sheets, and maybe I'm wilfully ignorant at best and belligerent at worst, but I'm convinced I can master it. If nothing else, at least doing one sheet at a time will lessen the likelihood of scratching the film. Anyway, part of the reason for going 8x10" from shooting 4x5" and MF digital on Linhof platforms is that I want to slow things down and concentrate on all aspects of the craft again. I'm not experienced with pyro developers and tray processing at all, but I've been shooting view cameras exclusively for a long time now and have been looking forward to experimenting for myself how different film / dev combinations etc might help lead to new territory for my work. I have some specific things I want to try for conceptual reasons, like ultra-long exposures of an area I've been photographing consistently for years, and I like the idea that the pyro might help compress the highlights of an image and help with printing.

I'm still intrigued with this brush processing technique, too. Must do more reading about it...