Thanks guys. I think there is enough here to give me direction to play with in RawTherapee: Contrast by Detail, Wavelet (Contrast, Edge Sharpness), and Tone Mapping.
I do want to stay with single RAW editor, just to make my workflow easier/faster. I was using Lightroom. I decided to move away from LR. I mainly looked at RawTherapee and DarkTable. I very rarely do local edits and I never use layers. After playing with RT and DT, I find RT has better interface and more intuitive to me.
By the way, I don’t use Canon DPP because it is just is just not efficient in copying and pasting edits to multiple photos.