Kris - I’m not sure you necessarily mis-used Liner Profiles. Like I said, I don’t use HDR Merge that often, and primarily use manual blends with LM’s. But today I finally got around to processing my shots from spring 2021. I had some backlit tree images that were difficult to blend manually, so I tried using HDR Merge. Example below
I tried various profiles to process this. What I am finding is that whatever profile you use on the bracketed raw files carries over to the blended DNG file. But once you have the DNG file, you can change the profile of the DNG itself. So I think maybe it doesn’t matter what profile you use on the raws. But for very high contrast scenes, once you get the merged DNG you can set the profile to Linear, and then you get all the advantages Tony talks about (more predictable slider results, colors, etc) on the DNG file. In the tree image above, changing the profile to Linear did a great job protecting both highlights and shadows. This image would have been a bear to process as a single image. And LM’s would be tricky to use to blend this, so HDR merge was the way to go for this scene.