Yes, I do any convert/assign steps with a QTR profile before exporting.
There is an interesting curve import feature in the driver, that I've not seen discussed.
If you printed a step wedge and from the measurements created a .acv file with the 'correction' curve then you could use it to linearise output. If my software skills were not so rusty, I'd have created a script to convert an i1 measurement file into a curve file :-)