[Leica] Ups and downs of stop baths?

[abridge at gmail.com (Adam Bridge)]

So I've gotten this general impression that a substantial number of
folks aren't fans of stop baths for black and white negative film and
just slosh around water in its place which.

So what's the thinking here? The stop bath gets in the way of fixing
later? Has some bad effect on film grain? I would assume that it would
be a good thing to quickly stop the development process.

Now when using very dilute devopers, like XTOL 1:3 where it's
essentially completely expired at the end of development, I can see
that just washing the film for 30 seconds with water might not be a
bad thing. But what about 1:1? Or some other developers?

Thanks for the guidance.

Adam

ps: Now that I have moved all my chemistry stuff downstairs I can
consider doing black and white processing again - probably with small
tank by hand - I like the result better than with the JOBO whose
continuous agitation doesn't give as good results as I've gotten with
hand tanks.

Thanks!

AB