Basic Photoshop settings for RAW JPEG conversion.. EX2F?

A different tack on this question. The manual offers precious little on Raw shooting beyond where to find the option to enable it. I searched the web and this forum and am still not clear on how to set up raw for shooting.

Which settings does RAW override?

Obviously aperture and shutter speed are in my control. Is that it? White balance? ND filter? Iso settings? Forgive the stupidity here. But I did search and this seems to be one of those questions that most RAW tutorials (all that I found anyway) skip past. Maybe assuming that anyone interested in RAW ought to be sophisticated enough to... "well, if you have to ask, you'll never know". Not the first time I've run into that in web tutorials broadly.

I may be obsessing over this camera since it was, for me, relatively expensive. I researched the hell out of it before buying, and my initial impressions of its EQ are dispiriting.

I'm worried about its IQ compared to my older SL420 right out of the box. In Smart, or Program mode with menu options, white balance AWB, Iso on Auto, etc, pretty much base-lined, out of the box it really frightened me. I've got another thread posted concerning this. Am probably embarrassing myself in the haste to determine whether it's the camera model, me, or a lemon.  I need to come to some decision by the beginning of next week.

As that other thread progresses it's mostly me (misapprehending some white balance control in auto modes), but I've yet to be happy with anything coming out of the camera in jpeg, and my first forays into RAW are even scarier. Again, my only base for comparison are four years owning the smaller sensor, auto only, SL420. Using Samsung's conversion software that came with the EX2F (how bad can it be for comparison's sake?) and selecting from among a few of the drop down options, default, fine street, landscape, etc, the results truly look like hell.

I won't embarrass myself further here by posting them. But I'm in a bit of a rush over the weekend to decide what to do with this camera if, despite all advice and input (literal and figurative), it is incapable of satisfying even the SL420's benchmarks... those being a harddrive full of photos from that old camera.

Thanks

Brad Williamson