as a reversal film shooter for many years, atually started processing my own in the Sixties. Not much choice those days, in fact I think the only available reversal film available at that time was Ferrania colour, followed shortly afterwards with Ectachrome.
As you say I/2 stop out and you where in trouble, but you could push and pull in the 1st development stage and also to a certain extent during the 2nd development, but obviously this affected the whole roll.
With B&W and colour printing work it was the end result that mattered not how it was achieved.
The question of how the final print was achieved was never questioned, but often admired, when it was carried out by the experts.
Almost every photographic society had a least one or two of these masters and needless to say they always walked away with the various competitions.
This leaves us with the problem of when does post proccessing/manipulation go to far.
IMO this has already been answered in several of the previous posts.
The intent to decieve
Again in my opinion, with a liftime of photography behind me, I would say anything goes, with the above proviso.
I have been a member of photo forums "digital" for over six years, but this talk of "getting it right in the camera" is relatively new, and I suspect that the majority of people saying this are relatively new to photography.
I guess at this point I must mention at least one of my images in the gallery which is a composite.
http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...php?photo=2295
This is a photo of a butterfly which was taken in north Yorkshire. I knew at the time that the photo would be rather poor due to the background.
Approx 1 hour later I noticed some thistledown and thought this should make a nice backdrop, So I took a photo, then combined the two when I got home.
The essential part of this image is the butterfly and in no way has this part been modified, and I'm more than happy with the result. maybe you will think differently
Harry