>>3174236my workflow is to start in camera raw (or camera raw filter when just grabbing random jpegs from /p/ to edit) and do the lens corrections (usually just the ones under Upright in the Manual tab, but occasionally some of the ones in Transform if it seems necessary), then I'll go to the Basic tab and usually take the highlights down and the shadows up or maybe make some adjustments to the exposure or contrast slider just to even out the dynamic range and maybe bump up the clarity. if there's something really off colour-wise i might try to fix it in the HSL/Grayscale tab after that, but i usually just open the image at that point.
after that i move on to adjustment layers and usually do a colour balance to get the general colour scheme i want, hue/saturation to saturate/desaturate and brighten/darken individual colours, and brightness/contrast to get some more contrast out of the image.
getting back around to what you said about objective though, i think it's just basically a matter of looking at the image through the lens of each individual function and determining which ones you want or need to bring out certain qualities in the image. this might also include putting parts of the image in their own layer to adjust independently from the rest of the image to make things more uniform (in the case of your picture, i made the sky and the portion of the trees where there was a lot of sky sticking through into their own layer and brought down the brightness and contrast of that part of the image because the sky would blow out when i tried to get more contrast out of the image without doing that, since it was the brightest part)
