To follow up on my original post, I mixed up a second batch of developer, and it worked much better. In the first batch, I had substituted metol for phenidone: I used 20 g metol instead of the 2 g of phenidone. For the second batch, I switched to Pyrocat-M. The only change was to reduce the metol to 2.5 g. With the same developing time, this gave a neg that looked thin, but had a slight brownish tint. It printed with far more contrast than expected for such a thin looking neg. I print on salted paper, and in general it is hard to get enough density into my negs. My previous standard developer was D19.

I will continue with Pyrocat-M. My first neg is somewhat over-developed, in spite of its thin appearance. I processed for 12 minutes at 70 deg. The dilution was 2:2:100. I could try processing at 1:1:100 next, or reduce the time to 10 minutes.