What’s your approach to designing RM shear walls?

Thank you in advance for indulging me.

I’m tasked with standardizing our design practices for masonry shear walls, specifically per TMS 402/602-2022. Seems like everyone does shear walls a little differently, based on a search of this forum; maybe this thread will show otherwise. Correspondingly, I’ve narrowed my focus down to a few questions for y’all. Assume 8-inch fully grouted CMU for simplicity.

1. Is your diaphragm collector always fully continuous along the shear wall, or do you ever intentionally detail it to be periodically attached for a “panelized” analysis of discrete shear walls along the same shear wall line (with proper movement joints, etc.)?

2. For the continuous case above, how do you check stresses at the corners of wall openings? Software, hand methods, etc.

3. ASD or LRFD?

4. How often do you check biaxial bending on exterior shear walls? What about just in-plane P-M?

5. Ever call out special blocks on the drawings?

This has been a fun project for me. I don’t do a ton of masonry. If you read this far, thank you.

I (we) almost always used Ram Elements shear wall module for design (ASD). In-plane, out-of-plane, vertical loads, openings, etc. put it all in there and let it go to work. Biaxial bending often controls. It's very user friendly, details reinforcing around the openings and provides a nice little green check mark when it works.