Jase: Thanks but I'm not yet convinced that it has hit a spot:) Building a good skin from flat without a proper lut is challenging. In your sample the most problematic issue to solve was to avoid greyness in darker parts of skin midtones (ex. deltoids in shadow). When the image is 8 bit flat and desaturated, increasing saturation makes an artificial "plastic" look (due to a math of most saturation tools). Usualy it can be avoided by adding previously extracted color layer (in davinci: ilumination at 0, in ps: add color over neutral grey layer). But it work only to some extend. Adding the same amount of sat to hi,mid,low also could mess an image up. Personaly I would experiment and not dial down the saturation in the camera. Lowering contrast values are great but lower saturation in 8bit could be inferior setup. But it shoud be a testing subject and not academic blablapotesis.
Have you got any portrait sample?