Your conclusion is far from my discussion, but it makes a lot of sense.
Getting the same result for every print is certainly hard, every with the most advanced billion dollar's machine in exact the same batch. This is exactly what happens in the integrated circuit industry. There is cross wafer variation, on-wafer variation, on-chip variation, and etc. Not only the physical characteristics of the different device (with exactly the same design as far as the engineer's concern) are different, some may even not function at all.
But that is rarely any photographer's concerns. Back to the stand development, the fundamental is its blindly compress of the global contrast and blindly exaggeration of the micro-contrast. It is fundamentally against the film's design principle (whichever the film), and also likely to deviate from each shot/scene's vision characteristics (unless you are shooting the same scene under the exact same lighting and exposure condition across the whole film and whole batch).
The silver masking technique can also compress the global contrast and exaggerate the micro-contrast, and you can control the strength of the effect shot by shot. This is much better than the stand development. But even the silver mask is still blindly applied to the whole picture, that different objects in the same picture could use different treatment. This is where burning and dodging can help.
I have seen Christopher Burkett's Ilfochrome prints. I can't pay more my respect to him and his print. you can visit here if you are interested.
http://christopherburkett.com/
