I concur, quite a lot of people quote each other, the explanations nonetheless are credible and well founded. Ron Mowrey confirmed it multiple times both publicly and privately. The arguments were simple: while developer research and slow and stagnant, emulsion research was a very hot topic as long as it lasted. Most effects, which were very successfully used in the 50s and 60s were directly incorporated into modern emulsions. If specialty chemicals provide an advantage, it appears much more economical to put them into the emulsion, and you also get a lot more degrees of freedom (compounds don't have to be water soluble, can be deployed on grain surface or inside grain, can be placed into any emulsion layer and not necessarily from outside to inside, ...).
To make a long story short: this topic has been beaten to death, most people consider currently ongoing debates about this topic just rehashes of old discussions and will therefore resort to copy&paste replies instead of formulating something fresh each&every time this comes up again. Anyone is free to prove all of them wrong. Calling all these seemingly identical statements "platitudes" is just a display of inexperience.
PS: I just revisited
the thread with Dan's preflash results. Obviously his results look very nice, what's not to prefer about that preflashed pic of the machine shop? However, when push comes to shove, his preflashed image offers not much more than one or 1
1/
2 stops more shadow detail, which is already impressive, but not the giant push suggested by the "Superia 800 @ EI 12800" text. This is not a 4
1/
2 stop speed increase we see here.
PE and other insiders always made it clear that it all had to do with keepability.
For a long time there has existed a number of techniques, known to the public and more interesting perhaps others proprietary to research labs, to speed film up drastically.
But if the film treated or manufactured with these techniques only lasted a week or two weeks on the store shelves, it was clearly a problem, unless you where going to remodel the distribution channels.
It might have been a hot topic of research. But even professional astronomers and other scientific uses, was a very small market to make complex and advanced production lines for.
The hypering they needed they had to do for themselves, and then mostly tailored for long exposures.
Keepability is a fundamental once you go over a certain threshold.
Try putting a bodycap on a digital camera and set it for just a day long single exposure without any noise suppression or multi exposure malarky on, and you are going to see some heavy thermal and ambient related noise.
That is what film has to stand for, for sometimes years at a time, granted sometimes helped a bit by cold and shielded storage though. But only reciprocity failure saves it in the end from accumulated noise death.
Improving short ("normal") high sensitivity exposures, quickly fell off the radar of the industry when it became clear to film manufacturers that it required remodelling the entire distribution network and also the consumers approach and attitude to shooting (as in the cliche of the typical thrifty mom treating film as though it was gold, even if the actual expense of each shot was laughably low, having stretches of years of their childrens lives on a single roll of 36).
Professionals either didn't care too much for image quality or grain (newspaper shooters), or always carried a flash or worked in a studio.
The topic might seem beaten to death, because it has always been attacked from the same angle, with the same weapons and with the same mindset.
A lot of talk and very little action. And the "action" that
was taken was either done in secret at EK, Fuji etc., only to be scrapped like so much other brilliant corporate research, or was done by amateurs with limited resources and knowledge to persevere despite initial setbacks.
We are in a unique position now, only within the last 10 years or so, that knowledge and access to knowledge in papers have become a lot easier to get at, and more free flowing.
If not online directly, then in sourcing the appropriate literature and actually getting at it.
That alone makes it worthwhile to have a fresh look at this old problem.
I'm sorry if I touched a nerve with "platitudes". But is there a better single word for automatic and conditioned response?