Digital BW, The Print

I've been doing B&W printing with a 2200 and the UT7 inks for about a
year now and have been getting great results on matte papers with
Eboni black. I drive the printer with Quadtone RIP and build most of
my paper profiles myself with a Noritsu DM-201 densitometer.

However, I've had very limited success with printing on glossy and
semi-gloss media. The biggest problem I've encountered is that the MIS
Photo Black ink is simply not very dense. 

For example, I'm trying to create a QTR profile for Epson Premium
Semigloss paper. If I print the QTR ink limit file in calibration mode
with all limits set to 100%, the density of the 100% Photo Black patch
is only around 1.9. This is weaker than the densities of the Dark Warm
Gray (2.1) and Dark Cool Gray (2.2) 100% patches. I've actually gotten
better results from profiles that just use the gray inks than from
ones that use PK and the grays, though neither looked particularly great.

I recently ordered a bottle of the "experimental" PKN Photo Black
Neutral ink since MIS claims it has a higher Dmax than regular PK.
However, I neither noticed nor measured any appreciable increase in
density, at least on the Premium Semigloss paper. It is a more neutral
black, however.

So, is this normal behavior for the MIS Photo Blacks? With the Epson
UC Photo Black, I routinely got densities of 2.2+ with this paper. It
just seems odd that MIS's Photo Blacks would be this weak, when their
grays clearly indicate that they can make a denser ink.

My search through the archives yielded little info on this topic, but
it does seem that densities around 1.9 are what people have reported
in the past for these inks. Is this true across papers, or is the
Premium Semigloss just a particularly bad choice for the MIS inks?

The only potential problem that I can imagine with my setup is that I
have put the PK ink in a light black cartridge and am using it in that
position, because QTR allows me to control which black to use in
software, and I have no need for the "Custom Light Black" that usually
goes there because I'm not using the Epson driver. Perhaps the light
black position in the print had incapable of laying down as much ink
as the black position, but I've never heard mention of this.

I've already tried asking MIS about this, both on their forums and to
their tech support, but received no response.

Any help would appreciated.

-Jon