"I don't believe a clip-test will identify a possible failure.(posted 8575 days ago)Why wouldn't it?"
I think the risk here would be that given the fickle behavior of XTOL, how do we know that even if XTOL develops the test strip well, that it won't conk out on the important images five minutes later? Of course, if oxidation is really the problem, I suppose we can trust that it won't conk out within 15 minutes. The only XTOL failure I've experienced so far, happened after the developer sat 2 weeks since the last use.