Lets approach this differently then, since some of you dont understand what some of us are trying to say.
Its all digital, all the light coming trough the lens, hits the sensor, and from there its all a bunch of 0101010101's put into a system controlled by software. That software can do ANYTHING you program it to do, no matter if its DNG, mov, mp4 or jpeg, if you want to add a sidecar file with a preset, you can. It ALL happens in the camera, before the data is saved to the memory card, both presets and processing.
At this point, either of us, have any information about the facts, that if both DNG and/or jpeg files have been embedded with some presets, other than the lens profile. If you know, how do you know, and what is your source? and where is your documentation? and we are talking about files from THIS camera, and not DNG in general.
What we DO know by now, is that there is more than just one experienced photographer being used to work with these kind of files day in and day out, and not just theoretical knowledge, that have drawn attention to this.
Or are you implying that all of a sudden a bunch of experienced people suffer from problems with their eyes?
So, back to the starting point in ACR when you open the DNG.
If the "neutral" point where the CENTER is, STARTS with a profile that is considerably way off the "neutral" point, then you will not have the same space to work with, cause the distance to the ends is less, cause the sliders have a maximum range, you cannot just pull and pull until the sliders disappears out of the screen, IF there was a preset added in ACR, it should have shown the sliders moved to the the respective points, so we could pull them back to neutral point and start from scratch. We cannot even delete the presets that might be there, so we still end up with the same issue, something "added" that we can remove, in a non destructive way. Do we really need to argue more about this?
If the HISTOGRAM on your camera displays a "perfect" exposure being in centre, what good is that, if the saved file is greased with black? (exaggerate just to illustrate)
Have you ever had a raw file in ACR you tried to lighten up the shadows, reaching the end point, even if you would and could have pulled it further?
What you do think happens if you just have 2 steps on the slider, compared to 5 steps of adjustments? That said, shadow areas in these files should barely be touched at all, but thats another story.
Alternative is to overexpose to compensate for the incorrect histogram, but it all still boils down to the same thing, it has TOO much CONTRAST, which means the DIFFERENCE between shadow and highlights makes it really hard(er) to achieve a balanced picture, where the dynamic between shadow and highlights looks good.
Or if we forget everything weve discussed so far, for a second, and ask this;
WHY does the DNG retouched to your taste, have LOWER quality than the processed jpg that have been saved twice already?
That alone is also a mystery to me.
I still believe all this is software related, and the data saved FROM the camera is causing this, nothing else makes sense considering that a raw file contains 50% more data, and on top of that are "unchanged" raw data.
Dji have done weird things before in their software that didnt make sense, and its not unlikely they have done it again, for all i know.
Im confident the quality of these files can be improved further, by tweaking the software.
If everyone that participates in this thread, could upload their own set of untouched DNG and jpegs, then we can at least compare it to eachothers files, especially the ones that categorically keeps disagreeing that theres is something odd with these files.