RAW and Settings on OMD

mmmm, as I thought there is some controversy about this.

The one that bugs me the most is the GRADATION setting.  I shoot mainly underwater and since I use LOW in the GRADATION I seem to get better pictures (I postprocess them in LR or ACDSEE Pro): basically I seem to get less noise from the dark areas of the photo where I am more concerned about.  Maybe this is the effect, as someone mentioned, of underexposing 1 stop.

After a bit of googling I also found a link:

http://fourthirds-user.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10729

which does talk about the AUTO setting changing the RAW records.

And then I tried it myself and opened in ACDSEE Pro.  All settings (AUTO, NORM, HIGH, LOW) produce different pictures quite dramatically.  I did not try on shadows, NR filter, NR reduction.

So back to the original question:  "is there an official source about what is changed in RAW ORF files by the user menu settings?".

And maybe it also a question on how every SW program interprets ORF files.  Are they all the same?

Andrea