These are wonderful and I certainly can’t fault the in-camera results! I’m partial to the first for the drama but both are very nice. PS is not good for stacking as it can’t deal with “OOF overlaps” nearly as well as Helicon and Zerene. I think any of the programs will do best with uniformly spaced images that have a reasonable DOF for each. The in-camera bracketing should take care of that better than trying to do it manually as it matches the focus point interval to the chosen f/stop. You only need to tell it how many exposures to make to be sure you get enough total depth. It’s easy to see if you got enough by looking at the last frame.
It’s good you get the raw files to use if the JPEG isn’t good enough. I haven’t used Helicon in years but Zerene is very easy if used in its simplest manner – export the raws as TIFFs and drag them into the window for the files and click Stack > Align and Stack (PMax). Then save the resulting output file.
It has many features that can make it a much more complicated program but I’ve rarely needed them. If the PMax file has flaws, I’ll repeat with the DMap option (or run both initially) and layer them in PS and mask any flaws. But I always feel I’m flying blind in choosing the “radius” and often have to repeat it.