The reason I don't (and wouldn't) use RawTherapee is that it does not have any selection tools that allows you to edit parts of the image (beyond gradients).
What this means is that you set your global contrast and export the file for further dodging/burning and edits in Photoshop, Gimp or some other software.
If you increased the contrast of the image in RawTherapee you will have darkened the shadows. So, when you open the exported bitmap in Photoshop, dodging an eye or some other part in will give you a lot more noise and a lot less headroom compared to doing this work on the undemosaiced data.
This is a big design fail and an actual problem if you go beyond the most basic raw conversion.
My point was that you could probably simply export as 16-bpc TIFF and I'd be surprised if RawTherapee didn't support that (cursory search through the docs suggests that it can do so).
What this means is that you set your global contrast and export the file for further dodging/burning and edits in Photoshop, Gimp or some other software.
If you increased the contrast of the image in RawTherapee you will have darkened the shadows. So, when you open the exported bitmap in Photoshop, dodging an eye or some other part in will give you a lot more noise and a lot less headroom compared to doing this work on the undemosaiced data.
This is a big design fail and an actual problem if you go beyond the most basic raw conversion.