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I think there is a misunderstanding of what noise reduction means. To some people it means elimination/removal when it simply means Noise REDUCTION. The process of reduction is never perfect and in itself it introduces artifacts/noise to the image. Whether you notice it is another matter.
There is also a lot of signal in the "background" regions of an astrophoto that people destroy when they push the background to black. When you bring up the midtones to reveal signal you are also amplifying noise too. Its up to the person processing to determine a suitable cutoff point so they get the signal they want and reduce intruding noise... its a personal taste of the contrast between the two for most images which is why most are useless for photometric analysis.
I've seen and tried so many "optimal" settings rules people declare must be done and have yet to find any that actually work. Instead they may be useful starting points and as I process I make adjustments and measurements to feed back to my starting point settings and its an iterative refinement process to find "optimal-for-me" settings.
What works for you, works for you. Its about exploring options and understanding how they effect your final images. Too many people think there is a secret tool that does it all for you, the only tool is the person processing.
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