It seems kind of subjective, and depends on if you are talking about viewing on a monitor in-program, or producing output for the web/print/etc. I usually use sharpening (R-L deconvolution) and rarely use denoise, although when I do, it’s not always using the denoise tab, as the wavelet tab has denoise functionality, and certain RAW demosaicers have denoising advantages over others.
I went from Canon’s DPP3 to RawTherapee before thinking about buying software. It seemed so deep compared to Canon, and when DPP4 came out, I tried it a few times and found it laughably simple and slow as a row boat. Of course RT doesn’t do everything Canon can do with Canon CR2’s. Fortunately there is a suite of free tools out there that can cover some of the bases .
Tried darktable a few times. Parts of it are nice in a GIMP interface sort of way, but I always preferred the power of RT.
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