I’m going to go out on a limb here, as I’m finding it hard to actually see the material difference in the candle frame you describe in these screenshots, on my sRGB monitor, but it may be the “washed out” gradation you’re seeing is actually the retained data of the raw file, where the JPEG clipped the high-key parts and the camera processing increased that contrast, locally. I struggled a bit with such when I started to use raw files without the so-called benefit of the camera processing, but came to realize I’d been given a gift that I had to learn to manage.
For your third screenshot, you do have an opportunity to increase the overall brightness of the image without losing the highlights, in the simple application of a curve with a small ‘lift’ in the center, or lower, or higher, depending on your taste. What won’t happen with this operation is to push the highlights past white, as the curve gradually tapers to the upper-right.
From my experience, once you learn the ways of the curve, you’ll probably abandon all consideration of camera ‘look’ profiles and such, and just make your images look the way you want them to… 
Edit: I struck out ‘locally’, above, as I don’t think camera processing is that sophisticated, looking for specific patterns in the image and ‘gronking’ them around. That’s a techincal term…