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I haven't heard of either product. I use mostly PhotoShop, some DXO PhotoLab, and occasionally Capture One Express (sadly, that is going away).

In Photoshop, the first step is to process the RAW file using Adobe Camera RAW. That step converts a 2 dimensional array of coloured samples (each sample being an amount of a single colour) into a 2 dimensional array of coloured dots (with values for red/green/blue) - read up on Bayer Matrix if you need to understand that. One thing you will learn from reading up on Bayer Matrix processing is why there are extra samples around the edge of the mage - the Bayer de-mosaic process works best when it has samples all around each final pixel.

One of the key things to do first in processing a RAW file is to assign a white balance, consisting of a colour temperature with an offset - this is critical to getting accurate colours. If you assign a colour temperature that is too high everyone in the image will look like they are wearing dreadful fake sun-tan (very orange); if you assign a colour temperature that it too low everyone will look like they have come out of a freezer - hues of blue! RAW files usually contain a measured / estimated white balance, but you can include a grey card in one of your early images and set a proper white balance from that. Always get your white balance right from the outset.

With the white balance set, you then need to adjust the exposure, and set the black and white points. I read an entire book about using Adobe Camera RAW (Real World Adobe Camera RAW - I started with the version for Photoshop CS2 - Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe were great!) - that might give you an idea how much there is to this process. I bought and read three versions of this book - it was worth the money!

With modern Camera RAW I generally do most of my adjustments using the Black / Shadows / Highlights / White sliders once I have adjusted the Exposure (often raising exposure about 0.25 to 0.35 - I often think I should set my Ec to +0.3) - I rarely bother with a tone curve these days.

This tool also includes (on the Details page) the old and new De-noise processing - I never liked the old (it felt more like a Blur tool than anything else), but the new "AI" de-noise is competitive with DXO.

This is not how the JPEG engine in the camera works. I would not recommend modelling your adventures in processing RAW files upon the way the JPEG engine in the camera works.

There are a LOT of controls in Adobe Camera RAW, and you probably don't need to understand most of them :-D  There are people who press the "Auto" button to get ACR to adjust the image for them.

I don't know if it's required these days, but I would suggest checking that you will be opening the image in Photoshop in "16 bit" rather than "8 bit" (a comment which brings back memories of long arguments about the "waste of space in 16 bit files"...)

Once you are ready, you press the Open button, and the processed RAW file opens in Photoshop, where I generally confine myself to cropping the image and remove spots and speckles and occasionally a photobomber   Then I save the result as a JPEG.

I don't know if the above is helpful.