Denoising is fine if you know how to. I know that I overdenoise a bit too, but I'm trying to lower it. I'll tell you how I do it anyway.
First, try to denoise before you level, and be careful that the black lines in the grays don't get blurry, that's the most important of it all. Now level, but try not to overdo it. After that, just pick the burn tool, range shadows, 30% exposure, and burn the blacks, but try to stay just on the blacks, because if you burn lines, you'll get them aliased, and if you burn grays, you'll get them darker, and you don't want that. Next, just resize, remove the text and typeset.
Anyway, I always recommend doing HQ releases with volume raws if available.