Welcome, you’ve asked some interesting questions and got a ton of advice - exactly what the forums are for! I’ll add my twopenny worth, apologies if you know all this already…
You mention you’re fairly new to shooting RAW and also that you think your processed images are deficient in sharpness and color.
In my experience, 90% of problems with sharpness are caused by focus, aperture or shutter speed. And these cannot really be corrected in software. A simple way of eliminating these is to remember there’s no such shutter speed as “Too fast” unless you want to convey movement in the picture.
So when shooting, select a shutter speed that will give you a sharp picture handheld. The rule for this is to use the reciprocal of the focal length as a minimum.
eg if using 100mm lens minimum shutter speed should be 1/100 second.
Secondly, think about Aperture - do you want a shallow or deep depth of field. Wide aperture (small number) gives a shallow depth of field around the focal point. Narrow aperture (large number) gives deep depth of field around the focal point.
Lastly adjust the ISO to get a decent exposure. (Because both. shutter speed and aperture affect the amount of light hitting the sensor)
White Balance - I always do this by eye. That doesn’t mean everybody should, but be aware the colour picker depends on there being a decent neutral colour in the image. Also, do this after tweaking the exposure as the exposure setting will alter the perception of colour.
Image stabilisation in lens and camera will help, but this is a good place to start. In a perfect world, your mastery of the camera means you use the software to build out, not correct the image!
On Clearview - it is designed to dehaze images. Settings less than 20 are preferable, anything over will add artifacts to most images. I try to avoid it altogether. Use the contrast tool or tone curve to introduce contrast instead.
On DeNoise - PhotoLab is brilliant with Noise but that doesn’t mean you should use it in all cases. If you have visible noise when magnified to 100%, then use the least aggressive noise reduction that solves the problem.