Chromogenic B&W films leave me cold. They do scan well, and have very fine grain, but they are just not as interesting to me as regular black and white films, and they discard the greatest strengths of traditional films- the huge variety of looks you can get by changing the variables of the whole process. With traditional films, you can really fine tune your results to suit your taste in terms of grain, sharpness, tonality, edge effects, contrast, etc. But with the C-41 films, the only variety a given film can offer is if you adjust your E.I. to get best results from your lab- and even this requires them to be more consistent than most labs take the time to get.
In the darkroom, the orange mask of the Kodak products especially is just horrendous. These negs are such a pain in the tail that I charge extra when clients want me to print from them. Ilford XP2 is better in this regard, but it's still more like printing through a color negative than a black and white one.
This said, I have seen prefectly good, even outstanding results from these films. I have shot plenty of Kodak and Ilford C-41 B&W stock over the past 10 or 15 years (I've never seen Fuji chromogenic B&W, though I guess they make it?), and had perfectly good results when I've given these films to a good commercial lab. If you can't do traditional black and white work yourself, or if scanning negs and working digitally from there is your preferred workflow, I guess the chromogenic films can be a good choice. But under any other circumstances, I can't see them making sense. For my own work, I've found that if I want the conveneince of C-41 processing, I'll shoot color and let the lab do it. It scans well and is easily converted digitally if I have to have a given shot in black and white. But really for black and white (which is easily 80% of what I shoot) I'd much rather shoot traditional films.
