Then how did Cliff (Crames) get such good results? I thought that the purpose of the color checker was to help me set the white balance and make a good profile for a unique lighting condition.
The inCamera software that I used generates an ICC profile from the ColorChecker that corrects not only hues and chromas, but also makes automatic changes that affect the tone curves and white balance. It forces all of the patches to match target values exactly in lightness, chroma, and hue. Other colors in the scene then fall into place.
I think the difference is that dng profiles don't adjust the lightness/contrast or white balance. You set those manually, and then the camera profile gets the various hues and chromas in line. As far as I know, it doesn't matter if you use the ColorChecker Passport-generated profile, or create one with the Adobe DNG profile editor, it's the way camera profiles work.
Like Onsight said, to use a dng camera profile in ACR, not only do you assign the custom camera profile, but you also have to click a neutral patch for white balance, and adjust exposure to a reasonable setting (for example set exposure so that the lightest gray patch has a green channel of 143 if your target working space is AdobeRGB). Set all of the other setting like "recovery", "fill light", "blacks", "brightness", etc. to zero. This will get you closer to getting the target values of the patches on the Color Checker and other colors in the scene.
Cliff