These "unusual" German style chairs obvoiusly don't appeal to everyone ;-)
Here's another phone snapshot showing them on a beach all in more or less straight lines, you can also clearly see the numbers you mentioned.
They are quite big an roomy inside, you can adjust them to put your feet up and there's a side table for the beer glass ;-)
Since it is quite windy in the region the high walls make them pretty comfortable.
A typical english version also has its charm, as in this image from the internet ;-)
I guess that all software packages have their own idiosyncrasies and learning curves. I've always found the noise reduction and sharpening in ACDSee to be pretty good. In the past, several years ago, in cases where I had a huge amount of noise I would start developing an image in ACDSee then at the end of that process I would start an external editor like Topaz denoise (from inside ACDSee) and make the final noise & sharpening part in that editor. Pressing save in Topaz brought you back to ACDSee. So that was relatively seamless.
In the meantime, the sharpening and Noise reduction has improved in ACDSee, and I also take precautions as far as possible to create RAW images with less noise and find that ACDSee works very well without external editors. It does depend on your settings and it is needs to be adjusted with a certain amount of "feel"
There are some tutorials in You tube.
One tip with sharpening is to change the mask setting, while pressing the ALT key.
This will show you (with a B&W outline image) what parts of the image will be sharpened. As you increase the mask setting, the lower grey levels will turn black in that view and will not be sharpened. Eg. if the clear sky is noisy and you sharpen it it will look worse. But if the mask is increased so that the sky looks smooth and mostly black when viewing the mask, then that noise wont be sharpened and you'll get a better result.
That Light-EQ tool is even better if you select mode = "Standard" instead of "Basic". Then select 9 bands and you can now brighten and darken 9 separate brightness levels in the image with those two sets of sliders. For realistic results best to adjust the bands gently and smoothly.
This is exciting. Are we witnessing the birth of a whole new genre to rival the Lonely Park Bench affectionados? Are bathing boxes acceptable in the new category? The German chairs seem to be a bridging step.
I understand ETTR. It is good to know about if there are likely to be shadows one will raise in pp.
However, action shots require point and shoot. There isn't any time to check exposure latitude, although with the perched shots yes. As a relative newbie, when presented with scenes like these, the moment tends to capture me and I may lose my composure - puns intended. A bit of theory certainly helps, but I think experience is the best teacher.