Godfrey,
You must not shoot Sony cameras much above base iso IMO the original a77 was just horrible in iso noise above 400iso. The NEX 7 was little better at 400 and higher. The a99 could go to 1000iso before imo it got hit with objectionable noise and the a77II hit that level at 1600iso.
I will admit I hate iso noise as much as I hated grain in film which moved me to medium format very early in my life and later LF. Topaz DeNoise was just about a have to on nearly every image above those iso's until DXO came out with Prime then I had a real noise busting software for that purpose. Did I mention I hate noise
You can get focus as good as you want at the time of capture but Topaz Detail will make the overall image just have that special look by just even uploading it to the plugin, hit apply and bring it back to aperture alone without using anything else.... though I do at times.
It's not that the plugins can do things better than one can do in the basic PP conversion softwares; it is just for me, it is much quicker day in and day out. For my needs and wants speed and IQ is money in my pocket.
bolded 1: I had the A7 for a year and a half. I found up to ISO 6400 netted good results as long as I had the exposure right. But I sold the A7 and all the rest of my Sony gear because I ultimately found the cameras too clunky to work with.
bolded 2: Now there is where we differ. I like nice, smooth renderings some of the time and I like grain at other times. For this recent Leica M-P photo, I added grain because, to my eye, it looks good that way:
With the A7, to my eye this is a grainless, typical ISO 1600 photo:
I still shoot with medium format occasionally, especially the SWC, and love its smooth grain too. But even there, sometimes a coarse-grained image is my preference and I jump up to Delta 3200 to get it:
(All three images rendered in LR, btw.)
The time I tested Topaz Detail, to my eye it made my photos look artificial. Decided not to buy it, or NIK, or any others.
But both of those notions are reach into the realm of aesthetic preferences and have little to do with camera capabilities.
I'm not in that much of a rush when I'm processing my work. And because I focus on getting it the way I want in the camera, processing is often a case of reading in the raw files, making a tweak to one typical image, and doing the same to all the others.
G