I'm sure Russ will groan but if you haven't read Adams' books the Camera, the Negative and the Print, do so. It will give you insight into the importance of processing, be it wet or "dry."
I grew up on Adams's books, Ed. In film days I did a lot of Adams-type shooting with a 4 x 5 view camera. I was way into the zone system. Sometimes I even modified my developer chemistry in accordance with the stuff in Ansel's books.
But, bottom line: what matters is subject and technique. Capture technique; not post-processing technique. If what you're shooting is crap, if your exposure is off, or if your composition is lousy, you can do all the frantic post-processing you want to do and it won't help. I ROTFL when I read somebody supposedly "teaching" photography (an impossibility on the face of it) tell his readers that you should go out and shoot and if you examine the result you can find many pictures within the shot. If you can do that, you're screwed. You blew it. You didn't know what you were doing. I have a friend who enjoys working on his pictures on his computer a lot more than he enjoys shooting the pictures in the first place. He does things like making people smile who weren't smiling, opening eyes that were closed., etc. He sometimes can fool the ignorant, but anybody with eyes to see can detect the fakery.
In post-processing, unless you were shooting at high ISO you almost always need a bit of sharpening. Sometimes you need to extend the tone curve a bit, and sometimes, if you had a difficult lighting situation you need to do a bit of color correction. But if you need to do more than that: crop, mess with the exposure, etc., you screwed up, and what you end up with is always going to be less than optimal.
There are exceptions. Ansel's Moonrise Over Hernandez is an example. When he made that shot he knew exactly what he was after, but the lighting conditions could only give him the framework of what he later had to bring out in the darkroom. Nonetheless, his framing and exposure, even though he had to guess at the exposure, were good. If they hadn't been, if Ansel hadn't had an artist's eye, Moonrise never would have seen the light of day.