I did a few roles of color negative film when I had a Rollie 120 camera. They have been a challenge to scan and process digitally, the contrast and color balance is so different from slides. But I agree that scanning in color probably gives you more control, and converting them to B&W is probably a good option. As you say, scanning is the hard part, it is tedious and slow. But once digitized it is so easy to "play" with them. Photoshop's B&W conversion tool provides a bunch of filter's (high contrast blue, infrared, and so on) that makes it really easy to looks at various possibilities. That part is fun.
JBWX