The nice thing about 8x10 is that, even far more than with 4x5, you can largely ignore the grain issue and choose films for other characteristics. Any decent lens will deliver overkill; and there too, its the particular rendering and covering characteristics that tend to define the topic, and not necessarily MTF. A set of lenses chosen for portraiture, for example, might be completely different from those intended for crisp landscape work. Most of my lenses are now Fuji, but I have quite a bit of experience with German lenses, and still use certain of those too, but no Rodenstock. I do have a few Rodenstock enlarging lenses, among other types. 8x10 also allows you to visualize detail rather remarkably during composition. But I try to limit myself to 4X magnification, which means around a 30x40 inch max print size. Ideal apertures with 8x10 tend to run f/32 to f/64, unless contact printing, where diffraction setting in from tiny apertures is a non-issue. I realize that this is the era of people trying to make prints as big as they possibly can; and 8x10 is certainly the real ticket to that. But why?? It's just a fad as far as I'm concerned. My darkroom setup is exceptionally precise, and I cut my teeth on Cibachromes. So I think the whole mantra of "normal viewing distance" is utter nonsense. If the detail is actually there, people will indeed put their noses or reading glasses right up to it. So there's that side of me. But I also have an alter-ego that loves 35mm work for the opposite reason. I want poetic little grainy prints that suggest rather than emphatically detail the message. About the only lens I use anymore, at least in the field, is a traditional 85/1.4 Ais on a fully mechanical later FM series. Spending more money on a lens wouldn't make a whit of difference, even wide open. In a drawer somewhere I have an old single-coated 55 mm Pentax lens for an early H1 SLR that wore out long ago. I'd like to find another body for it because I absolutely loved its color rendering, less contrasty than current lenses. But I rarely print 35mm in color anymore - almost never, due to the priority my larger film work takes in this category. So I'll probably never use that lens again. Medium format roll film has taken over the small "stealth" color niche for me anyway, and is obviously way more affordable than 8x10 film. I have 3 big 8x10 enlargers, but do smaller film sizes using a 5x7 Durst. It's all good. I enjoy every format. The one you've got in your hands at the moment is always the best! But at a certain point, all this obsession with trying to squeeze as much blood as you can out of a small tomato gets redundant. It reminds me of obsessive pixel-peepers. Get a bigger tomato!