Pioneer: Ever watch Chris Crawford's youtube on agitation? I absolutely love Chris and especially love a guy who bases his agitation technique entirely on Ike and Tina Turner's "Proud Mary": "'Cause we never, ever do anything nice and easy... we always do everything nice and rough." At least he's clear that he was never, ever able to get gentle to work. Crawford's style is more like Bond's martinis "Shaken (hard) and not stirred."
I was in Chris's camp with those issues, but eventually bailed on hand agitation for rotary with a Jobo. Now I use the gentlest hand agitation I can manage for developers to control or resist adding agitation induced grain gain. See Steve Schaub's youtube video on his "Figital Revolution" jive youtube channel for a good discussion and demonstration of gentle. After that, it's rotary processing all the way to just get'er done. I'm using B's processor for rotary these days and sold off the Jobo gear. This combination seems to have cured inconsistencies and excessively grainy skies.
Recently I tried D23 at 1:3 with 30 seconds of initial agitation followed by 10-15 seconds every 3 minutes and loved the results. But D23 is such a s-l-o-w working developer used this way. Next up is Pyrocat-HD which I"m really really looking forward to using. Bought the Photo Formulary version in Glycol to avoid (most) handling issues.
Somewhere along the line, I dropped the water stop and instituted a citric acid stop with D23.... just to be more exact. This followed info from Kenneth Lee's website posts on D23 - before he switched to digital. If my processes have a definitive start and end, then in theory, I can understand the impact of the variables I'm using and make adjustments. At least that's my working hypothesis. But I sandwich Stop Bath in between two water baths. Frankly, I do that with everything to try to keep the chemistry uncontaminated - especially if it's reusable like Fixer and Hypowash. I like to use developers one-shot and use TF3 Fixer 'cause I can mix it up here. Recently, I've begun to test for clearing times on a regular basis to set fixing time and have a solid basis for when to dump the stuff.
For those of us who've come back to film AFTER digital, with the film service infrastructure mostly gone (or at least not so prevalent) there's been a lot involved in sorting through what works for you and what doesn't as it comes to B&W processing. Forums like this have been a godsend, but that involves sorting through often 30 different ways folks have found themselves and that can at times be confusing. All work. But translation without demonstration and oversight.... doing this self-taught effectively can prove something of a real handicap in that I think you're either lucky at the first, or you're going to have to be patient with yourself and pay careful attention to refining a process that gets it done to your satisfaction and then being relatively rigid in sticking with it. Compare this with C41 where it's a fixed, identical process.... and I think the art of B&W is comparatively more subtle and complex... in essence, it ain't easy baby.