I recently made the analogy that Photoshop is sort of like a fully outfitted woodshop or garage, with specialized tools to do just about anything you can imagine, and that might be overwhelming to most people. However, even though it has more than most people need, with a little of knowledge of a few basic tools within photoshop you can do everything you need without being constrained by someone else's presets or plugins.
I have been doing digital black and white for several years now, mostly with drum scans from 2 1/4 and large format negatives but now more and more direct with digital capture.
Being a bit of a control freak I tend to stay away from things like silver efex pro which give you presets with only slight ability to control the contrast, sharpness, or shape of the curves adjustments. It makes it easy to convert and colorize and give you false boarders, but it also locks you into those adjustments to a good degree.
Lightroom is a good tool for initial "development" of the raw files as well as black and white conversion. Although in photoshop you are able to stack multiple B+W conversion adjustment layers and masks to convert select areas/colors—like using one layer as an orage filter to darken the sky and another as a green filter to lighten foliage.
The main benefit I've found is that photoshop gives you the ability to finely control local contrast through multiple adjustment layers when used like "burning and dodging" masks, combined with the ability of changing the blending mode of those adjustments. When used with a pen tablet interface, you can begin to gradually build contrast working intuitively like you would as if you were shading with a pencil (even if you are like me and have next to no natural sketching ability).
