Hi Ken, thanks for your post.
Playing Irish traditional and related folk music (eg. Old Time, Bluegrass, Quebecois) with greater bending expression than stock harmonicas offer is a topic I find particularly interesting. On both slow and fast tunes, fiddle players in particular use bending all the time! I find that aspect particularly alluring, because it's so expressive.
Trying to emulate their bends requires retuned harps, and I've made a few different ones with that aim in view.
PowerChromatic, PowerBender, PowerDraw give you bends on all the draw notes: a significant improvement over standard chromatics and even Richter diatonics. The new bends are mostly 1 semitone down, which does give nice expression. However it's not what's typically used by trad fiddle players, who are generally bending 2 or even 3 semitones (depending on where the bend happens in the scale). Those tunings were devised more for easy chromatic playing, not specifically for traditional folk music.
So to answer your question: you will get some nice extra expressiveness from PC/PB/PD, but not the ability to play exactly the type of bends used by folk fiddle players.
Since you already play Solo tuned chromatics, try half-valving one on the odd-numbered holes 13579; you'll then be able to bend those draw notes. (By half-valving, I mean remove the outside valves on those holes).
To emulate the bends used in fiddle and some other traditional instruments, more radical retuning is required. That goes further than most harmonica players want in terms of altering the instrument, but personally I love exploring this direction! Here are a few tracks playing some more extreme harmonicas to get wider bends:
https://youtube.com/shorts/brvP1n7zvVA? ... Tk3buvngTZ
https://youtube.com/shorts/vlkbb3pDUDA? ... ZkeUZSjnoT
https://youtube.com/shorts/pGhj8Q-D_pU? ... rp4PqPPq7w
https://youtube.com/shorts/56TCHEFdvbQ? ... lOYDz61aAa
https://youtube.com/shorts/fQFJHMy5-FU? ... 5JWxNsAlsk
The goal of adding more flexible bending to harmonicas, for traditional folk music, blues or indeed ANY style of music, is something I'm trying to achieve using different approaches. I have another thread on it in this Forum, with extra discussion and examples. But certainly playing Irish trad with more "soul" was one of the prime motivating factors.