Development attempt #2

It occurred to me that I had created a nightmare of my own making by using an ill advised procedure with my last demosaicing process.
Then, I set the white point, created a series of sample gray points, and adjusted ‘shadows to set the 52,52,52 gray patch.
Of course , behind the scenes it had created a spoon shaped curve to compensate for that gray shift…a much more exaggerated curve than I expected.

In this instance, I set the white point, created a series of sample gray points, and adjusted contrast to simply expand the entire curve. Most importantly this should be in a, more or less, linear fashion.
This affected where the paper-white point resided and required an exposure tweak but, regardless, this still resulted in a ‘straight line’ adjustment that provides better, but not perfect, results.

Note the aRGB colorspace although its displayed in sRGB here. Sadly, this adds another layer of obfuscation.

<< The insight that the 'shadows' adjustment produces a spoon shaped curve is valid but unfortunately this new assumption that the behind the scenes 'contrast curve' should be straight proves to be not valid >>