I guess, I did not nail my experience properly with my initial posting, but it’s hard for me to find the right words.
I fiddled with the Contrast and the Blacks sliders in LR, but they flatten out everything or lighten up a large portion of the darker tones respectively. The contrast of the whole image suffers when I just want to work on the nearly-black areas.
Maybe a screenshot helps (Z7, 100% TIFs; a building site’s detail of tarmac; out of focus area):
Left: LR, camera profile "neutral" --- strong contrast, black shadows
Middle: LR, camera profile "flat" --- less contrast (but also different color), still pretty strong shadows
Right: RT, no further adjustments, film-like curve --- lighter and less contrast still, smoother gradient of tones
I can further work on the RT file in Photoshop and preserve the finely detailed tones in the shadows, even if I push the very darkest tones to 0/0/0. If I do this with the LR files, I get large areas of black blotches.