I only shoot B&W, but honestly, anyone who is at all serious about this should be developing their own film anyway. Same w/ printing it. Darkroom work is really easy once you get it all set up, and if you do your own developing, you can customize your workflow 100 times better than another lab could ever do. The cost is almost nothing too. No, I would much rather my money go into buying film than paying someone else to do what I can do much better anyway. I cannot imagine that shooting colour would be that much more difficult to learn, even given the requirements to work in darkness, keep your temps exact, etc. It ain't exactly rocket science, it just SEEMS that way at first. If I can learn to do it, anyone can.
This is something everyone really needs to learn because if I know what film I am going to shoot, with what developer (and how I want to develop it with that developer), and with what subject and lighting, that will tell me a lot about how I want to print it. Knowing that, I can better understand what type of paper to print it on, whether or not it would be better to tone it, go w/ a lith print, and so many other things. The more you understand the process, the better your photos will be. And I don't even have a dedicated darkroom! Been printing up to 16x20 w/ fiber paper in a tiny bathroom and a bedroom for years. Used to block out all the windows, stuff towels around door frames, all that. Now I just wait till it gets dark. I may be older and slower, but after a while you learn a little something :]
Tucson may be a largish city (although it never felt like more than an extravagantly sprawled out small town when we lived there), but we are talking about an imaging process that is well over 100 years old, and has largely (and poorly) been replaced by digital. New York is a really big place, but you won't find many people painting frescoes or printing lithographs there anymore either.
