The main thing to get exactly right in the Raw converter is the White Balance and the Picture Style conversion choice (usually broad categories are available like Landscape, Portrait, Faithful, Neutral, etc.).
Then set the capture sharpening, which is the sharpening over the whole image to counteract the effects of the anti-aliasing filter. It should be minimal. Sharpening is a three step process. The second step is creative sharpening and blurring and noise reduction in the Photoshop processing. Finally, do output sharpening after each final resizing of the image depending on destination medium.
Noise reduction and sharpening are counter to each other, so use masks in Photoshop, including masks that you might generate from edge detection, for example, or that you might paint, or that you might alter an automatically generated mask with blurring or painting.
In the converter, you can do basic cropping and adjustment of exposure, contrast, and saturation, but be conservative, underdoing it, erring on less rather than more, since you need a little headroom for all of them to get it just right in Photoshop. I don't crop until after correcting any rotations in Photoshop, since a rotation correction, even of 0.8 or 1.2 degrees, will require cropping afterward.