Yeah, that’s basically what I do too. It’s to get a nice starting point.
I think with this, DT can give you a starting point comparable and even better than any other commercial software.
The issue that I still have with DT is manipulating the highlights and shadows. I still haven’t figured out how to do that properly. Tone eq is nice but I can’t really push it. Color Balance RGB luminance works ok on some images but often I get some desaturated hazy result, like I’ve just put a white layer with some transparency over the image. I also often loose a lot of detail.
I can kinda fix it with local contrast and contrast eq but it’s still a hit or miss work and pretty cumbersome.
Granted, I still need to figure out color balance rgb workflow in depth so for now I’m assuming that I just lack the skill.
I can get a great result with Lightroom tho. But I presume Lightroom’s highlights, shadows, whites and blacks sliders do a lot more then just raise or lower the tone. I’d have to figure out what it does exactly and try to replicate it with DT. But it must be something similar to color balance rgb in a way that it must use some sort of masking but probably adds some local contrast with the same mask. On some images where I have harsh shadows and highlights I can just pull two sliders, one up and one down and I get the perfect look. I can kinda get similar result in DT but with a lot more messing around an never quite the same quality. And I’m pretty sure it might just be my lacking skills but it’s still to be determined 
To give you an example, look at this image:
And I know, this isn’t a great edit, I pushed it as far as I could. But it was so fast and all the detail is still there (some washed out leaves area an the right bu an easy fix). Now I’ve done similar edit with DT 3.6 but I either loose the detail in the grass or the detail on the roof of the shack.
Another image would be this (I haven’t tried color balance rgb yet on this one but I remember struggling very much with this image with tone eq, exposure, masking etc):