Digital BW, The Print

After spending hours reading here, as well as Paul Roark and Clayton Jone's excellent site, I have decided to try my hands on digital black and white printing.  I was originally looking at the R260/R280 series and the C88, and saw that the 1.5 pl droplets would be a nice specification and decided against the C88.  The R280 has been replaced by the Artisan 50/RX 580, and no body here seems to have used it.  But I decided to give it a try, since the specs are exactly the same as the R280 and not wanting to buy used printers.

   I have made quite a few prints on the new printer with the Claria inkset on Ilford Galerie Heavyweight Matte, and the results were not quite satisfactory.  I used the grayscale feature on the Epson driver, and prints have a bluish/greenish cast to them, but the prints were fairly smooth (or smudgy?).  Then I tried using QTR with serveral BO curves (claria BO curve, ones that made by Paul Roark that neutralizes the tone), I can get much more neutral prints with it.  However, the prints are rougher comparing to Epson driver prints (ie. the dots/grain are much more visible).  With QTR, printing at 1440 super (don't know what it means) just looks bad, unmistakably from an inkjet; printing at 2880 dpi, it's still a little rough, but not a bad look.  Besides the more neutral tone, I like the QTR prints because the tone transitions appear to be smoother (even though the "grain structure" is rougher).

So here's my long list of questions:
1)Is the grayscale on Epson driver equivalent to BO?  (If not, that may explain why the Epson prints look smoother)  

2)I have not tried any glossy paper yet.  But from what I gather here, the claria inks do much better on glossy paper than matte. Do you think that switching paper would produce better contrast?  I am particularly interested in Red River SatinPro.

3)Is it normal that printing with QTR is slower than Epson? The difference is huge, taking almost twice as long for me with QTR.

4)I plan to try the UT-RC inks.  But investing in all six cartridge will be a significant cost ($120) that I do not want to commit to yet.  Is it possible for me to buy only the PK position and do BO printing? or can I dilute the PK ink like the EB-6 for smoother prints?

5)From my understanding, the Eboni ink is the same in the warm/neutral/cool ink set, and the only difference is in the toner cartridges.  Does this apply to the PK ink?

6)Would using the UT-RC set produce smoother prints comparing to BO printing?

Thanks for reading all this.  Digital printing has been hugely confusing.  I still have many questions on profile, curves, and etc.  For now, I just want to make some good prints using existing profiles.  But I am not afraid of diluting inks, especially if it means I can make a smoother print while minimizing cost.