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 never tried RawTherapee.