Hi Mark,
Will just add views if I may..
From your list,
The developing tray - stores like Wilco have loads of different sized plastic pet litter trays for pennies and cheap themometers
The tin plate crystals - have never used them, but from what I have read in ET posts they are either rather nasty chemical to use and / or very expensive.
Tinning with your iron can do a good job, or solder the items on the board as soon as, then use a pcb spray to stop the copper oxidising.
Buy a fine point Permanent Marker like the CD pens sold in Staples etc - they are good for touching up broken tracks proir to etching
A little bottle of pure Acetone from larger chemists / supermarkets for about £1.30 is a good solvent /cleaner.
The Ferric Chloride, if you can buy from Farnells or Megga, then Meggas 5lts of Ferric at about £20 + carriage is far better value and its just ready to use - well needs a little water for copper actually - about 6lts really. It last for years so will be fine stored in its plastic bottle.
PCB drill /s -the tungsten are better, but standard ones will also do the job.
I've haven't got a high speed drill, just use one of the old bench pillar drills.
For starters 0.8mm, 1.0mm and 1.2mm are handy sizes .
Press and peel - works ok-ish, used it for a few years, until I found you could laser onto magazine paper - which actually gave better result than P&P.
However with both of them if you start, as Iam sure you will, doing really fne tracks for micros and some smd parts, then trying to hold them with the papers is very difficult. Even with a fine point touch up pen you cannot easily make good two t12 tracks close to each other.
As I've started to move onto finer work, I've found the only way is the UV method, sounds expensive, at the end of the day it does cost a little more but you would never get the results without it. Can send you details of my led uv system if interested.. might be something to progress onto after the P&P / paper method - all the etching stuff is just the same so nothing will be wasted - I still use the paper stuff for 'heavy' circuits like psu's etc.
hope some of that helps you...