Oh-Kay... MY methodology... if there is a method in this ma-a-adness...
The history goes thus; I started with a camera; then I was given a fancy camera; I took lots of photo's, thought there has to be more to it than this; snapping away, sending films to tru-print or boots.... bought a 'starter' E6 dev kit with 3 slide films... bought dev tank (Probably the wrong order that!), started shooting slide; went to night-school to learn 'something'.. bought an enlarger; started developing & printing my own B&W.. tried colour.. failed... did some more B&W, tried tinting and toning, and trying everything else in the Dark-Room handbook.... etc etc etc.
THEN, 1/4 century ago, I started doing an OU course in Info-Tech; bought a multi-media PC... and so the ma-a-dness went even more ma-a-ad!
"Digital" was still somewhat in the pioneering arena of theory rather than practice. Direct to Digital cameras were not in the high-street; BUT, there was this document 'scanner' thing the secretary used in the office....
My first digitised photo's were then made on that, from Boots Prints, after OU Summer-School, mainly so I could post them on the course bulatin board.
Follow-on, was discovering the MicroGrapFX software that had come with that office scanner, and deciding to see what it could do, and concluding that it could do most of what I did in the dark-room under my stairs.... more slowly! BUT with less mess, and without spending so much money in Jessops!
Around '98, marriage loomed, and the dark-room was NOT a kiddie freindly bit of house-space.... plus babies begged me running to and from ASDA to buy Nappies in bulk, leaving little to spend on printing paper at Jessops...
The Digi-Dark-Room, was then a way to do the much-the-same thing with less spend and space.
In Y2K, early direct Digi SLR's were starting to appear on the market; I was not impressed, either by the potential IQ and less, the exhorbitant price tag.
Consequently, I bought another a bulk length of E6 Slide film and chemicals, and a rather expensive 35mm SCSI 'Scanner'.. an Acer Scanwit 2720, as it happens.... cost about £500 then, and I still use it.
Takes 35mm film or slide, makes aprox 10MPix full frame scans in 64bit colour-depth; great widget.. just took all night to scan 4 frames.... then the PC would blue-screen! Lol.
However... it chucked out scans at higher resolution than almost any direct-digi camera for a decade, and I still got negs to archive; could mess with images to hearts desire in Digi-Dark-Room, and print them without the enlarger on a desk-jet... as winter-net came into popular use, allowed photo's to be shared on line and used on Forums etc.
This 'Hybrid' work-flow... then is nothing all that new, and was from the early days of wigital a convenience, IF you wanted all the advantages of digi-dark-room, without space, mess or hassle.... and with modern PC's not 'so' want to blue-screen in the over-load of digi-bits... I can scan maybe four frames in maybe an hour, now!
So, I only bought a direct-Digi SLR about five years ago, when they fell to under £500 price range.
MEANWHILE... drop a film into Boots or ASDA; mini-lab tech had pretty much mirrored what I had been doing at home for a decade, as H&S regs went mad, and enviro-mental-ists complained about the water consumption and stuff.
The Dry-to-Dry mini-lab, has been making 'Digital' prints for probably twenty years; film developed as conventionally in chemicals, drawn through the tanks; then scanned as it comes out, and the prints you get in the packet made not from projecting light through the film onto photo-sensitive paper, but printed elecronically, with a thermal printer; some-what higher resolution than a desk-jet... but still pixilised.
A-N-D most contemprary commercial film Dev & Print services STILL use such 'hybrid' process. Tradidional 'Wet' prints are still available, B-U-T they tend to be aa frame by frame, premium service, at a price, not a 'bulk' one for a whole roll.
SO, even if you try using a film camera as in days of old, and getting an envelope of prints from the Mini-Lab they will most likely still be a hybrid Digi-Print, not a wet-one.
Little renaisance in photography about the time I bought that Digi-SLR, and Daughter started studying GCSE Photo at school.
SHE wanted to 'Do something with Film'.. and dug my old Zenit off the top of the wardrobe and threatening to hit me with it (I'm convinced it was a Soviet Weapon of Mass Destruction!); So I bought some out-of-date Kodak print film off e-bay, and took her out to shoot a roll or three, whilst I snapped away with the Digi.
On the way home, we stopped at ASDA to drop her films in to be D&P'd, and pick up some donuts and stuff for tea. Rather remarkeably, she was looking at her envelope of snaps, in the car, before we got home.... I just about had the SD card uploaded to PC and was able to look at them, maybe an hour later after tea..... So much for the 'Instant' photo's promiced by Digital! Lol.
ASDA.....
ANYWAY, films dropped into ASDA; mini-lab, an extra 50p bought a CD and for 50p per film, up to three films worth of the scans could be saved to it, and provided with the prints.
Cost something like £10 a film.... which probably isn't too much more than it used to cost 20 years ago, a-n-d, in analysis of how much I have spent on digi-kit in the last decade, would probably still have been cheaper to have films processed than buy all the digi-chit!... but still...
That's one way of organising Film-Photo 'work-flo' in modern age.
Have to say that I was not particularly impressed by either mini-lab prints, or scans.. or the cost....
Back to original 'plan', to some degree. And home developing film, and home scanning it.
B&W is a doddle; chems do many many films, if you batch them up, and I can still get HQ scans off the negs via that old Scanwit.
E6 Slide? Films tend to be rather pricey; and Chems more so and are one shot, so I dont think I have shot a slide-film in probably 15 years.
Colour-Print film, is more widely and cheaply available; C41 chems are more available and more reasonably priced, so make more 'sense' for colour photo, especially if they are going to be digitised, anyway.
BUT, ASDA... will develop 'only' for £1 a film!
So for colour, that's the go-to solution, saves mixing any up, buying chems, having them go off once bottle opened, or mess in the kitchen, or wondering if I need chance the battery in the kitchen clock again!
Negs collected from the counter, un-cut, rolled into original film bottle; I bring them home, chop to six-frame lengths (Rather than 4's, as I get more in my archive binder pages, and can scan 6 at a time not just 4), then slap strips into the scanner carrier and press the button.
THAT is the 'work-flo', in modern parlance.
I could still make wet prints for B&W if I wanted under the enlarger.. I couldn't do colour 20-years ago... had the hardware... had the know-how... just not the skill! So, I tend to do neither! Once developed they go Digital, and get looked at on-screen. I dont think that I have even printed any via desk-jet for half a decade.
Actually the last prints I made like that, were to stick in a photo-frame clock in the living-room. They are actually an acceptable quality for that, or even larger frame display, and under-glass, remarkeably few folk ever even notice that they aren't conventional 'wet' prints.
As such the tactile pleasure of opening an envelope of prints, is rather an expensive one, and when you have flipped through 35 bits of paper, and not been so 'wowed' by them, I personally find rather underwhelming.
Get the film, scan it to PC, look at them on screen, more little delights seeing a thumbnail and 'ooh! that looks interesting!' clicking it and opening up a full screen version, to see just how really dissapointing it is.... BUT.. I have something like 10,ooo 'film' pictures on the PC, they take up a heck of a lot less space sat on the hard drive than in a shoe box or carrier bag or in albums on the shelf. They are there, and almnost instantly accessible to view, and bigger; organised into folders, much easier to find than random prints wherever they have been dumped. Its oh-so-convenient... A-N-D I can, as hintimated, make prints, IF I want them, either as for the clock or window-sill frames, via desk-jet, or under the enlarger, or by taking neg into Boots.
I really dont 'see' any sort of hypocracy shooting film, and viewing digital, I have been doing it that way for a long time, since before direct-to-digital cameras were on the high-street, let alone 'as good' as a digitised film photo.
It's really a question of how you would like to do it.
1/4 century ago, there was a lot of lore and seriouse snappers deriding commercial process and print, suggesting that if you wanted to 'take control' of your photo's you should do it all from start to finish, and develop and print your own pictures...
But even then, how far do you go? I mean, that would suggest you are deligating big chunks of the job, using commercial film stock and printing papers, or chemicals.
When I first set up the dark room, my Gran actually got quite interested in it all; she had been a qualified chemist before WWII, and she started telling me about when she was a child, and her mother, watching at her elbow after being sent to collect the eggs from the chickn coops and hedge, and her mum sorted out the bad ones, and seperated yokes and whites, not to make merangue, but the base emulsion to mix up with silver nitrate and stuff, to smear on bits of picture glass, to make photo-plates for her home made camera! I mean THAT is taking control of the whole process from end to end!
SO, how do you want to go about it? Whats your objectives? What 'bits' of the job interest you?
The technology, puts tools on the table you can choose to use, or not; its entirely up to you. Digital, just gives you a few more tools to choose from; and these days many do.
BUT, debate over Digital, reminds me of my old Wood-Work teacher spending a term teaching us to use a hand saw, and refusing to cut anything on the electric band saw, insisting that power tools let the crafts man craft more, or let fools eff-up-faster.... which was quite audaciouse when I was 11, to hear a 70 year old tortiose of a teacher use the 'eff' word, long before Gordon Ramsey came along!
But had wisdom in it. There's no such thing as the "Wrong Tool" just the "Wrong USE" for a tool...
Back to you... HOW do you want to do the job? Pick the most apropriate tool to do it!