Also worth considering how often you change camera bodies: if you get a new one you may have to upgrade CO to get support for the new RAW format. (AIUI, they don't backport things like that.)
Ugh, that's horrible. Needing a full app update to handle this minor updates is annoying. The one thing that I did appreciate about Adobe's Camera RAW is that it was constantly being updated with new profiles that would work with whatever version of software being used.
Good, ergonomic, efficient tools are worth their weight in gold. C1 is one of them. Importing/triage, editing, color profiles, tethered shooting - it's an incredibly powerful suite and works well.
For particularly problematic noisy/dark shots I'll do manual editing in DXO, but I do everything else in C1.