Digital BW, The Print

David - I'm sure there are many on this list with more expertise in scanning
who will answer your post, but I thought I would add a few thoughts:  Your
description of what you plan to do in exposure and development of the film
suggests that you have awareness of the zone system and the experiments you
need to do in order to determine the best exposure index and development
technique for conventional printing from negatives.

If you're going to be scanning the film, you'll need to make sure that you
also eliminate all but one variable at a time in the testing at the scanning
stage of your experiments in order to get decent information.  In the same
way that you needed a different exposure time and development for printing
with a cold light enlarger head than you might for another light source, you
may need different combinations for your scanner than I might for mine.
You'll also need to decide what to do at the scanning stage - i.e., will you
set the gamma and black/white points manually or use an auto setting?  If
you're going to all this trouble, I certainly wouldn't count on doing more
than you need to in Photoshop - get the best negative that you can to start
with.

If you have access to digital files of step wedges that you've printed in
your system before, you might want to use the info palette in Photoshop to
see the densities of the different dark steps in terms of K value.  You
could then get a sense of what the film density needed to be in that area in
the pre-scan stage.  Once you determined the exposure index that you needed
in order to achieve the proper density in the film's shadow areas, you could
then see what you needed to do in terms of development to see where the
middle and high values needed to go to avoid blocked highlights.  Then if
you really want to torture yourself, you could try different developers to
see which one gave you the combination of grain and sharpness that worked
best with your scanner;)