That's right, I want you to share your bad experience with XTOL. I want to hear all the problems with XTOL before I decide to settle down with XTOL as my regular developer. Oh, and, let's steer clear of the "what's the best developer?" argument and try to stick to the bad things about XTOL.

Why am I asking this question? I returned to B&W film photography and processing after being out of it for about 30 years. Over the past couple years I've been accumulating the "pots and pans" to soup film again... and trying different film developers. Every developer that I have tried, see the list below, has resulted in MF and LF (and 35mm, arguably,) negatives that scan well and produce better B&W prints using an ink jet printer than I can achieve with my late model DSLR. Bottom line, I'm as joyous as a swine in fecal material.

I recently tried XTOL at the incessant insistence of a friend, who told me to just try it without reading anything on the internet about it. So, I did, and while there was nothing magical about the results, there was good tonal separation in the negatives. Anyway, I'm thinking about settling down with XTOL as my regular developer, and possibly using one other developer for compensating development.

Here's the list of Developers I've tried:
D-76
Rodinal
Pyrocat-HD
Pyrocat-MC
Rollo Pyro
Diafine
Acufine
HC-110
XTOL