Here is an attempt to make some sort of comparison. All of the caveats apply. I opened your DNG in ACR 8.7 (PS CC) and there were ACR settings embedded in the file - I assumed that those were your "optimal" ACR settings that produced a file that you found acceptable. I then tried to emulate the resulting image (rendered to PS in ProPhoto) by beep boop bopping in DXO.
Attached is a screenshot of the two resulting images, rendered and opened in PS, 2-up vertical, fit to window. The haloing that is apparent around the border between the tree and sky areas is amplified visually at this zoom level and is not so contrasty at 100% zoom. The side-by-side is just to give you an impression of the comparison in overall tonality, etc. See 100% res files (links in post below).
Some general comments. The blue and green channels are blown in much of the central sky area. This makes the resulting raw conversion highly dependent upon highlight reconstruction - i.e., not recovery with negative exposure, but reconstruction from secret sauce recipes for rebuilding areas of tone from unblown pixels in other channels. In this case, the blown areas are, more or less, neutral, so it should be fairly straightforward from a luminance standpoint. That said, DXO has never been good at highlight reconstruction, and ACR/LR perform compression and reconstruction automagically that the user cannot, to a certain extent, control. So the end result is somewhat reliant on the user's ability to coax the data into some visually acceptable form, especially given the lack of data in the cloud area. You can probably get something "acceptable" but it may not be very accurate.
I am not a DXO fanboy but I use it and other raw converters (RPP, Iridient Developer, dcraw, Raw Therapee, ACR, C1). They all have their quirks, strengths and weaknesses. That said, DXO has a pretty vast array of controls that make the learning curve steep. Plus, the controls often interact, again making their impact not so obvious. The two major adjustments made to your DNG in DXO were 1) disabling Smart Lighting and -2.3 stops exposure and 2) changing the Color Rendering to "neutral color, realistic tonality (gamma 2.2)." These two adjustments flatten the contrast of the image and give you a better starting point for redistributing the tones and adding local contrast.
As far as the funkiness of the Chromatic Aberration and artifacts in the trees on the right - firstly, you should enable all of the options in the CA tab; secondly, turn down the Lens Softness "Details" control. The same funkiness is present in the ACR image, but rendered slightly differently.
DXO, in general, is set up out of the box to make a lot of automatic corrections, even on a per image basis. For a very challenging image like this, it is often better in DXO to start with the "No Correction" preset. Sometimes it is easier to get where you want to go with an image to remove all of the corrections and go through your progression - WB, tone, contrast, color, etc. - manually.
In the post below are links to full-res JPEGs, converted to sRGB, of each conversion. I used the normal, "High Quality" noise reduction (Lum NR = 12 and 100 chroma NR) on the DXO image but I did not sharpen the DXO image. I did not make any perspective or optical corrections.
Overall, the ACR version appears to have slightly more perceivable detail in the sky compared with the DXO version. If you are not familiar with DXO, the ACR result would also take you a gazillionth of the time the DXO result would take you to achieve.
One thing that is very apparent is that the ACR version suffers from splotchy green and magenta chroma artifacts in the shadow tones throughout the image and, overall, the detail is somewhat smeared in many of the mid and shadow tones int he ACR version compared to the DXO version. I would say that, in my two conversions, the DXO image has better shadow detail and color.
This is a very challenging image to acquire and convert in pretty much any raw converter, with the 5D3.
kirk