Hi Gilles,
Based on what I have been told, and tested myself, most changes take place in the period of 2 to 3 days, just air drying. When using a fan-dryer to speed the process, I saw (more or less) that 30 minutes in the drier came to speed the process one day more or less… making it possible to print in 24 hours. This is all not that precise. In fact, one could perform a series of tests like you mention. It is indeed something important, if one wants to use negatives in the the long term for further printing (therefore, wanting to reach a stable result that can be repeated consistently), and so that linearization is correct.
In practice, though, I think it might be wise to wait for 48 hours to linearize (since it is something we want to have spot on and as a reference), and then try to print our negatives in 48 hours, or 24 hours by using a fan-dryer, if one needs to speed up the process. At least, the prints will tell us whether we are off or not… and we will always be able to come back to a stable reference.
Cheers,
rafael