I shoot raw exclusively and use lightroom as raw processor.
I have created individual import defaults for all my camera's to have a consistent starting point for all my camera's, so I mostly have to do some tweaking which is not much different from a little tweaking to out of camera jpg's, but with much more flexibility to correct white-balance and over/under exposure.
I also didn't like the out of the box colours Lightroom provided and experimented with some imported camera colour profiles that I found on the web. This improved the situation a bit but the final step that made in "click" was creating my own colour profiles using an X-rite colour checker and the Adobe dng colour profile editor. Now I'm happy with the results
Normally the denoise facility in lightroom is sufficient for my needs, but for extreme cases I use Noise Ninja.
Only steps I do in photoshop is a final sharpening for web viewing (Photokit sharpener) and add a 1 pixel wide white border.
I tried both DXO and C1 but found that within the 30 day trial period my lightroom conversions were better then what I could achieve with those programs (noise, colour and general rendering). I must admit that Lightroom in that regard has an unfair advantage, since I've been using that since the free beta version of LR1, so I'm much better at home in there then in any of the other converters.
I'm sure better people can achieve better results with any other converter (or LR for that matter), but in the end I'm a firm believer that the best raw converter is the one you know best.