Digital BW, The Print

Here's a fairly basic question about digital B&W printing that I hope someone can answer. 

I've been printing for a few years with UT7 inks (thank you MIS and Paul Roark!) on a 2200, 
and have mostly been delighted with the results. But I'm finding a few things annoying: (1) 
I've noticed that I get tonal compression in shadows, presumably because the curves are 
flattening out, that sometimes causes a loss of local contrast and makes the print look 
flat; (2) I want to try some new papers, such as Innova Fibaprint, but I can't find curves for 
them; and (3) I've made soft proofing ICC profiles (using an GMB Eye-One), which allows 
me to see the final tone on screen, and I've used these to make some contrast curves to 
get a better match between screen and print, but I had to fudge these by hand and I'd like 
to do better. 

So I'm wondering whether I should switch to the UT-3D (or perhaps the 4K+, since at 
some point I hope to upgrade to a printer like the 3800 with a wider carriage) and make 
ICC profiles. I've skimmed Paul Roark's notes, and I've looked at Roy Harrington's 
documentation for create-icc, but I'm missing some basic understanding of the underlying 
principles, so I can't make much sense of it.

In short, then, here are my questions:

1. How does a color-managed (ie, ICC profile based) workflow for B&W with grayscale inks 
work? Unlike a color workflow, we're trying to get different warm/cold tonings, so the print 
shouldn't match what's on screen anyway.

2. Paul Roark's description seems to assume that you combine his curves with profiling to 
generate the ICC profile. Why do you need to do this, and how would you generate the 
curve for a new paper? 

3. Is there a simpler way to overcome my problems?

I'd be grateful for any pointers. Sorry if I've missed a relevant posting.

Daniel
http://straightphotography.org