Ralph,
I've always been that way. I just tend to post perspectives that are missing from the conversations. My philosophy is you need to understand how something works in order to move beyond it. My photography isn't about reproducing reality. I tend to print for a heighten sense of reality emphasizing extended shadow and mid-tones. In fact, I've had people confuse some of my work for drawings. When I shoot, even though I set the EI at my tested EFS, I place the exposure where I have usable tones and that placement is dependent on the subject. For me, the negative is there to capture the information, not define it.
I don't understand the slight underexposure comment either. Plus, I find it counter-intuitive that the short toed film needs a higher contrast paper than a long toed film or that a long toed film reaches a higher level of quality than a short toed film. Still, there it is.
There are a number of counter-intuitive aspects of photography that I find interesting. For instance, as the illumination on a print dims, there's a point where the darker tones look lighter and the lighter tones look darker. Another counter-intuitive example comes from The Theory of the Photographic Process, "When the film characteristics, camera exposure, and negative development are accurately controlled and held at what might me called the "normal" level, there is a distinct tendency for observers to prefer prints made on the "normal" grade of paper regardless of the luminance range of the scene." A flat scene processed normally will look better on a grade 2 paper?
Let's consider some possibilities of the underexposure statement. First, it is slight underexposure and what is his definition of underexposure as there is a safety factor built into film speed. Simonds never said anything about losing detail, and since short toed films have a good toe gradient, there shouldn't be a problem with loss of shadow separation. It would probably be comparable to normal exposure with a long toed curve.
Second, he said the negatives were made within a studio setting where flare is lower. "The effect (of flare in outdoor conditions) has been to convert the short-toe film into a long toe film...These considerations indicate the desirability of a long-toe film for studio photography and a short toe film for outdoor photography in which normal amounts of camera flare is present." Perhaps if the tests were done outdoors, the results would have been different.
Third, one of the images Simonds used was a portrait. From Theory of the Photographic Process, "For the portrait subject, a higher gradient is evidently desired in the middletone and highlight regions of the reproduction, where the skin tone usually lies. It is obtained at the expense of subdued contrast in the shadow regions." Maybe that is a contributing reason why the "slight underexposure" and higher contrast for a short toed film as the long toed film will naturally produce this effect. Kodak used to advertise TXP as a studio film and portrait papers were said not to have a straight-line.
Finally, maybe it's just something new to us that we need to consider.
Since this information is scientifically obtained, I find it's worth pondering, and at the very least, to realize that there are always caveats. As the ultimate goal of photography is to produce something that is subjective, art, I can bet that there are caveats even to those universal rules of film exposure and development. Of course, I'm not talking about the chemical process of development or the physics involved in exposure. It might be fun to take a look at some of them. If it were all so cut and dried, there would only be one system and we wouldn't have need of magazines and forums such as this.
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