Back to the old AA mantra, huh? Yeah, seen any of those classic 8x10 images of his enlarged more than 2.5X ? I sure have. That will cure you of the myth fast. We have better film, better lenses, better cameras, better developers and papers, and sure as heck often way better personal darkrooms than he did. I frankly don't give a damn what either AA or Strand or even Kodak said about pyro. Staining pyro revolutionized my own workflow. It could be hell to print shimmering highlights otherwise, especially back when graded papers were the only premium paper option. The proof is in the pudding. And there's a helluva lot of good pudding out there that wouldn't exist were it not for the significant improvement pyro has actually made. But Kodak naturally would toot their own horn; that's what made them money. And pyro formulas weren't nearly as convenient as they are today.
There are old negs I made pre-pyro which I set aside as hopeless for decades, and have been able to print well only recently, after really outstanding VC papers arrived. Sometimes I salvaged them with registered contrast masks. If you want to make comparisons with some of AA's subject matter, with say, shimmering ice all the way to deep high altitude shadow in the same scene, not only back in D23 and Commercial Pan days one went nuts, but I also went nuts using way more modern film and developer combinations. Once I adopted pyro, those same extreme contrast scenes almost printed themselves. Incidentally, I don't rely on compression or compensation or minus development like classic Zone theory mandates. I want my cake and eat it too in terms of full tonality expansion, even if it involves a 12-stop range. So I consider the whole bag of tricks as fair game - staining pyro, VC paper, masking if needed. Whatever works. We should be grateful for all the tools in the tool box we now have, including those we inherited from Ansel's era.
So don't argue with me. Argue with my prints. Hundreds of them. Plus the prints of many others. But I guess in Glasgow or Montreal you aren't accustomed to extreme contrast range challenges. (Or here today, in our own fog & forest fire smoke mixture - about six stops range at most here today, sometimes four; hopefully not later in the week - I love fog, but not mixed with smoke!)
Now your turn to pull your sabers, Micheal & Lachlan. But the West Coast School can be a pretty tough critter to defeat. Just too much classic work depended on things Kodak either didn't know, or didn't want to admit. As far as toxicity, it has been inherent to pyrogallol usage for thousands of years, and always will be. But strangely, somewhere in the middle of all that, nitrile rubber gloves came into existence. And if you want to know about pyro tanning of gelatin, current medical R&D goes far beyond anything Kodak did. Pyro ain't going nowhere. It's here to stay.
Another 76 posts to go .... Oh, 'scuse me, another 76 @ D76 posts to go.