Further Experiments with the Nikon D600's Exposure

This post is a follow up to my earlier post about experiments on the Nikon D600's exposure.  In that post my observation was that the Nikon D600 appeared to have a tendency to not give importance to highlights.  For some shooters, the resulting image looks fine.  For me, I like to protect highlights and there were way too many blown highlights even with ADL (i.e. the exposure is too "aggressive").

I posted about this observation on DPReview.  Here is the thread.  I received many helpful suggestions.  I tried out the suggestions, and I will discuss the results in this post, learning a few things in the process.