One question, which obviously still burns under everyone's nails - after Ron left it unanswered: is there a measurable effect from using a Citric Acid based stop bath on color film? Ron claimed one should never use Citric Acid, but couldn't remember the exact reason for this.
One more question if I may:
There are articles and patents, which claim, that a slight addition of a phenidone type product increases speed of color developers, both in film speed and in speed of development. At the same time I never ran across a product from Fuji or Kodak, where this effect has been used. I have seen this effect in my own experiments, and no, it's not that mythical "half stop speed boost", but it's detectable and one should have reasons to forego it.
Has this ever been tried in his research lab? Could he elaborate on that?