It took until the 70's & 80's for knowledge & techniques of grain growth & sensitising methods to get to the level necessary to be able to manufacture the fast, very high chloride content emulsions needed to make multigrade papers work really well - and until the 90's for those techniques to really reach maturity along with concomitant sensitising methods using less dye & super-sensitisers.
As for the Tmax, I'd not severely underdevelop it - better to get your lower values largely where you want them via exposure & processing & use the good linearity of the highlights on TMX to pull them in at printing/ scanning stage by whatever means necessary.
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