What did Rik Mayall say "I'm so bored I could watch an entire episode of 'The Bill' without vomiting blood!"???
Less jokingly, I find with B&W images, particularly scans and files from cameras that don't respond well to a lot of modification, that bracketing and making the worst imaginable HDR image, then making the HDR image a layer over the "optimal" (middle exposure) image and blending them using masks of different opacity is a pretty good way to work on very tricky images.
But the output from that software is pretty damn vile.
Marty