I'm thinking of using that again but I fear the lack of film in shops and the lack of a good labo to develop my pictures...
If you still have the F5 and want to do B&W, pick up a roll of Ilford SFX. It’s easier to find a lab that processes C-41 chemistry than anything else, and it’s easier to scan than traditional B&W.
> Every scanner has settings for both black and white and color neg.
The fact that your scanner “has a setting” just means that people want to use the scanner for this purpose. It does not inform you which alternative you should choose.
> Plus, scanning "black and white" shot on C41 introduces a host of issues into post-processing.
I can't imagine even one issue in post-processing. Once you scan it the film, you get a monochrome image. With C-41, the post-processing is easier because you don't have to do as much manual cleanup (due to IR cleaning, above).
Speaking as someone who has an entire shelf dedicated to binders of film—B&W is much worse to scan than C-41. I personally shoot mostly traditional B&W but I recognize that my use case is different from most.
Personally I prefer to shoot B&W over monochrome C-41, but if you are not sure how much effort you want to spend on film and are going to scan, then it makes sense to go C-41.
Anyway, here's my take on "black and white" C-41 films: I just don't see the point. Traditional black and white film is a beautiful thing. From an aesthetic and technical standpoint it's far and away better than C-41. The only advantage C-41 has is the ability to drop it off at a corner lab, and those are becoming more rare by the day. I'd much rather just shoot a high quality true color negative film and convert it. I don't do that very often but I'd be kind of surprised if you couldn't get a better looking image from converting, say, Portra, than shooting a "black and white" color negative film. Every time I've tried films like XP2 an whatever the Kodak equivalent was, the results have been resoundingly underwhelming.
I don't know if I'd say hand-printing is faster, but I guess it depends on how fussy you are about prints. I mean, you've got to do your test prints, your 'straight' print, then figure out your dodging and burning, though once you've got a good print then making copies is fairly straightforward. But oh man, paper is expensive these days.