DPP (Digital Photo Professional vs ACR (Adobe Camera Raw)

I purchased a Canon EOS 50D sometime during the winter. The camera is awesome in well-lighted situations and the photos required very little editing. However, it performed poorly in low light situations where high ISOs were necessary. I tried everything to fix the problem. I used camera raw/photoshop with noise ninja. I even calibrated noise ninja to work at it's best and in the end no amount of detail was kept once the noise reduction was done. I either had noisy photos with some detail, or clean photos with no detail. I was at my wits end. Then, I decided to try DPP. Originally, I thought it was a foolish idea but WOW... I was completely blown away. All of the images that I had a trouble with before came out clean AND sharpened. I was wondering if other people have experienced the same thing, or is this some weird fluke. Is DPP a better converter or is this the case with only Canon photos? I would really like to know what other photographers think about this.

I don't use ACR, I use Lightroom. I have given up totally on DPP.
Not for the results, but because it's so appallingly slow with large disks and many folders.

In Lightroom I can work directly with the RAW images too. like you can in DPP, and export to jpg for printing.

If I had one of the newer Canon cameras with dust reduction software encoding that is picked up by DPP, then probably I'd be forced to use it the Canon software.
I'm sure on those cameras it will produce different results than other tools that can't use the embedded dust reduction data.

It's not some weird fluke. Canon is famous (or infamous, if you prefer) for NOT sharing proprietary information about their digital Raw format. Since DPP would have access to that information, and ACR does not, it would stand to reason that you would get better conversion of your Canon files from Canon's own converter.

- Joe U.