Update:
I'm exploring the design space just a little. It is 165mm f/6.3 corrected for an 8" x 10" film format. It can be used with a Copal 1 shutter. I am now sitting at 200g of glass in a 8 lens / 6 group configuration. It has settled into a variant of the Super Angulon configuration (not surprisingly), but not a true Angulon. Basically 4 singlets and 2 doublets where the S.A. includes cemented triplets (in your jargon, a 3 element cemented group...I've always avoided these due to cost). Size? The OD will be about 65 mm diameter, or roughly 2 1/2" and the total length when assembled onto the Copal 1 will be perhaps 3". Back focus is 134 mm, or about 5 1/4".
The performance is very good. Even wide open you can focus so that the central maybe 5-10 degrees is very sharp....although I would focus at about 50% out. This will provide a subtly soft focus. Corner softens just a bit more but (hopefully) not displeasingly so. This is due to residual field curvature. Light rolls off as you'd expect for such steep incident angles at the film plane. I had to vignette just a bit to get it in the Copal 1. So wide open you'll see about a 2 1/3 stop loss at the corners. Stop down the lens one click and it is no longer vignetted, and you lose only about 1 1/3 stop at the corner (check my math... illumination is 40% at the corner what it is at center). The roll-off is gradual even wide-open.
Stop down the lens to f/8 or even better f/16 and it really sharpens up. At f/22 it is just about diffraction-limited over 75% of the film area. At f/32 it is diffraction-limited in all but the very corners. There is very little focus shift (at least where I set focus for optimization)...maybe 10 microns from f/6.3 to f/32?
I have not corrected out beyond about 80 degrees, but it should illuminate far enough out to accommodate some reasonable amount of the lens shifting that you large format guys like to do. Perhaps I will leave that unexplored and just let you find out with the real lens
I'll use multi-layer coatings to avoid ghosting and keep the throughput up. I'll be looking at ghosting since there's a couple of elements where the ray angles off the glass surface are close to perpendicular. That's usually the surfaces I have to watch. I'm not too concerned...just one of the many details to look at in a lens design.
Cost? I used cost as a constraint on glass type selection during optimization, so the actual glass-cost is lower than it would have been if I used high-index, low-dispersion glasses. Honestly I didn't really need them. Without having yet quoted parts, it'll be lower definitely than, say, a new Schneider S.A. even if the total quantity sold were to be only 100. Should be significantly so.... but I do not want to speculate further. I am generating drawings to send out for quotes so that I can look at the cost curve (per unit cost vs. production run quantity).
I saw an opportunity to replace the doublets with singlets and sacrifice just a bit of performance to reduce cost / weight further. That variant sits at 165g of glass and lags the performance of the lens described above by about a stop (ie how it sharpens as you reduce the aperture). Even wide open it is pretty good.
The next step will be tolerance analysis (to verify that production run lenses can be assembled inexpensively and maintain performance). I expect tolerances to be loose but we'll see. I also need to generate a solid model of the lenses and send to my mechanical engineer friend for him to design the barrel. He has worked in the industry as long as I have...this will be a simple problem for him.
Zemax has the ability to simulate how the lens actually images. It uses an image file as the subject (typically some kind of pattern meaningful to an optical engineer or a very well-corrected test photo) and generates the image as you'd see at the film plane at whatever resolution I care to set. I'm trying to find a high enough resolution picture as the "subject" so that I can provide a good demonstration of what the lens will be able to do. But... the kids are awake now so that will have to wait until tonight.
I'm also going to see what just the front or back groups will do by themselves.
Oh... and of course there is no distortion (corrected by symmetry), and no uncorrected color. It is a good lens. The layout looks really good.
And yeah.. pretty soon I will cross-post to the large format forum.
-Jason