I had similar experiences with DT.
When taking RAW+JPG I always struggled to create an edit of the RAW in DT that is more satisfying than the out of camera JPG - and I watched quite a few videos and read a few guides, also trying to work with scene-referred workflow introduced in DT4.
I'm currently giving Capture One a shot (Express version is free for Sony users) and I'm really pleased how accessible the UI is. Applying default adjustments already gives a great starting point for further tweaking (similar or better than the OOC JPG). Recovering highlights also works way better than in DT. It just felt like the algorithms in DT are sometimes not quite on the same level.
I did a lot of side-by-side comparisons between C1 & DT on my raw files and I could not get DT to make anything that looked like C1's automatic adjustments.
The best I could determine is that the out-of-the-box adjustments made by C1 were somewhat complex (e.g., it wasn't a 'simple' transformation of rgb values).
Obviously, it's preferable to know what's happening under the hood instead of relying on black-magic, but I just didn't have the time to invest in trying to figure that out.
C1 is really nice. I also compared it to Lightroom and I didn't like those results as much as C1.
edit: Although C1's masking features are excellent, I wish they had more parametric masking features. That's the one thing I miss from DT.
I never tried RawTherapee.