Did another deep dive down the GAN rabbit hole (and tangential related) and came across these at dpreview.com
raw photo editor
https://www.darktable.org/
lower the noise in low light photos
https://prd.kandaovr.com/2018/07/14/introducing-kandao-raw-a-tool-to-boost-low-light-image-quality/
Anyone heard of / used any of the above?