Maxed Contrast in Picture Style: Am I Missing Something?

I just play with my cameras, don't have to make a living at it, so I'm no pro though I think my sense of color and composition is OK. I love lots of clean detail. Mostly I shoot things, not people. I prefer to make the camera do the work and post process only to rescue something I seriously messed up. So I shoot JPEG almost exclusively (It's OK to laugh.).

I was pretty disappointed at what 5D2 did with the built in picture styles, especially the colored cotton balls it made of low contrast areas of vegetation and the washed out skies. Many people seem to dial up the saturation and/or use CP to get the colors they like. Both shift the hues way too much for me: results seem cartoonish to my eye. One day, I started with Standard PS, cranked the contrast to max and the sharpening up one from default, rest at default. I shoot withNR dialled down. To me it was like getting new lenses with some magic power. I can find none of the ugly edge work that too much sharpening adds, little of the foggy branch against the sky problem, colors are much more saturated without being changed, the skies look natural (well, a little better than that, maybe), and colored cotton balls are rare.

Even my 18-55 IS and 55-250 IS do stuff that looks like L (ahem (I have several L's to go to for comparison)).

The occasional too dark shadows that bother me are so easy to fix in Photo Shop that even I call it a non issue and can find nothing that looks bad to me at any magnification in the adjusted shadows.

The effect is the same with my T1i and even my Panasonic FZ35 (my choice when I want a picture more than I want the education, especially macro stuff).

Perhaps some of you who so clearly know incomparably more than I do can suggest something?