That seems like a pretty decent start to me. Was not smoking at all out the exhaust? The little missfire on first start could be some air still getting into the lines.
I have had low compression in a diesel before, and it took a lot longer than that for the bad cylinder to start firing.
Did...
It makes sense, as it's esentially increasng cylinder volume. On a 22:1 compression diesel, even a tiny bit makes a difference.
With diesels, compression is easy to tell by how they start. So if this situation were mine, I'd be looking for even compression numbers between cylinders, cold...