A good and interesting article in general. Interesting comparisons of different processors.

Noise reduction before debayering is clearly the way to go, especially if read noise can be estimated and removed from masked pixels at the same time.

Constructing a noise profile, per camera model and per ISO setting, would be ideal. (Commercial programs like Noise Ninja do this, for example).

I notice once again that ETTL is being described as ETTR, but that doesn't impact the main point of the article.