My 35mm negatives almost invariably print well at Grade 2.5 or 3. My 120 negatives are the same way but Grade 2 usually.
Then I sometimes use some Grade 4 or 4.5 to burn in interesting details to locally increase contrast, or I might use Grade 1 to tone down a difficult highlight.
But one of the founding principles of silver gelatin photography is that you are best off making sure that you are familiar with how your paper and paper developer behaves before you develop negatives. The negatives are necessarily exposed and developed such that they fit the paper and paper developer combination as well as possible. That way there is a lot more room for getting creative with low and high contrast filters, rather than using them to save your ass. If you process your negatives to have intentionally low contrast, and you have to print at Grade 4 or 4.5 in order to get a decent work print, but find that you would like even more contrast to become a nice final print - well, then you're basically screwed. Sure you can play with negative intensification and high contrast paper developers, but that is making it very difficult for yourself.
I claim that unless you learn how to process your film so that the negatives print well, without darkroom gymnastics, at medium contrast filtration, then you're never going to eke out the maximum performance from your materials. This is a basic concept within silver halide photography that gives a solid foundation to develop and expand from. It should be some a lesson that's mandatory for darkroom students to learn, that the lens, film, film developer, filters, paper, paper developers, agitation, temperature control, etc etc is a system, where the final result is something borne out of optimizing the performance of all the pieces so they fit together nicely.