QTR-Quadtone RIP

While your approach may be yielding some good results, I'd want to avoid
any technique that relied that much on tweaking your system. 

Monitor brightness, room lighting and print viewing lighting are vital
components of getting a consistent print workflow. Whilst I'd not personally
choose to use the huey, it's better than nothing - and whatever you do,
turn off that ridiculous 'change my monitor settings when the sun goes
behind a cloud' setting. The fact that the huey overrides your tweaks is
exactly what it -should- be doing... 

Whilst I use soft proofing quite often in colour work, I rarely ever use it
for B/W.  Since I've got two main printers (Epson 9600[Mk] and 7880[Pk]) I
can produce a wide variety of B/W prints on different papers. My own
preference is to print a known B/W test image on different papers and get
to know how they look under a known consistent light source.  Working
from a calibrated/profiled screen I then have a much better 'feel' for how
any particular image will look as a print.

The image on the screen is (IMHO) only ever an intermediate stage in getting
to the print I want - I find that placing too much concern of soft proofing
and WYSIWYG means I'm not concentrating enough on the final print. You
mentioned you have plenty of darkroom experience, I prefer to think
of the image on the screen as similar(ish ;-) to getting a good negative.
A lot of my paper/ink/printer choices are analogous to picking a paper
and what to do with it in the darkroom (BTW I wouldn't want to push the
analogy too far! ;-)

That said, my B/W work has improved a lot since going digital, and in
my commercial photo work (mostly colour) I haven't touched film for 4
years.

I think the key to consistency in my own printed work comes from
adopting a colour managed workflow, and making sure that things like
room lighting and print viewing lighting are also pretty constant. You
don't need to spend a lot on lighting, I recently looked at the GrafiLite,
which is based on the Ott-Lite 'task lamp'. It is ideal for viewing A4 test
prints of the type I have for all my B/W papers. The constant light allows
me to quickly compare papers and decide which fits the 'feel' I want for
a particular image. I still do test strips with parts of images on paper
(particularly if it's a big print) but it doesn't take much practice to get
a 'feel' for how an image will look (having a known test image helps)

Hope that helps somewhat?

Keith Cooper

PS I've written some short articles expanding some of what I've
mentioned above, that might be of interest?

My test B/W image is at:
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/black_and_white_test.html
Some thoughts on the GrafiLite:
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/lighting/grafilite.html
Why screen and prints don't match:
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/match_prints_to_screen.html
Room lighting for image editing:
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/room_lighting.html