One of the first things I do in post (and I learned this from grading motion footage) is to neutralize the shadows and hilights. If those are neutral you can totally push the midtones into any balance you want and it will still look decent. To do this, I use a Levels adjustment layer, go into each channel and bring the sliders up to the edge of the histogram. Usually this will look great. Sometimes I need to push the midtones in a different direction for good color and I do that with a curve layer and again targeting a specific channel. Sometimes I also need to lift the 3/4 tones a bit.
I've never really put much effort into my sharpening. I let Capture 1 apply it's default sharpening and then I'm done. I never sharpen any more than that. I see a lot stuff that looks just crazy sharpened. What's up with that? If you focus your camera right and shoot at a proper aperture, your stuff should be sharp.
Hope that helps. Let me know if there was something more specific you were looking for.
CB