Camera Raw renders Raw files with JPEG-like adjustments

[gfbugaboo]

I recently started working more frequently with RAW files in Camera Raw. I've been shooting JPEG+RW2 with my Panasonic camera. Today, something changed. I preview my photos using Picture Information Extractor (PIE), so I can see what both the JPEG and Raw files look like. If the JPEG is really good, I edit that in Photoshop Elements 2018. If not, I open the Raw file in Elements. When I opened my last two Raw files in Camera Raw, what Elements displayed on the screen looked exactly like the JPEG file; it had preprocessed the Raw file. Here's what the Raw file looked like in PIE:

But what Elements displayed is identical to the JPEG version of the photo:

This never happened before; what PSE displayed upon open was identical to what PIE showed me. I have not consciously changed any settings in PSE. As a check, I installed Faststone Image Viewer and opened the same file in that. At first, it rendered the file like the JPEG, but it prompted me to select the settings I wanted for viewing RAW files. The default was Embedded Preview Image. When I changed that to Actual Size, it rendered the RAW file the same way that PIE did (Half Size seemed to produce the same result). I looked for a setting like that in PSE Camera Raw, but didn't find any.

Here's what the Camera Raw Preferences show:

 

Does anybody know what might be going on here to change the Camera Raw behavior, and how I can get it back to the way it was? All that processing on the RAW file seems to be defeating the purpose of using RAW.

[gfbugaboo]

I went over this with Adobe technical support. We did several tests, which demonstrated that Camera Raw was displaying the image correctly, and that the other photo editors were processing them differently. The photos actually look better in the other editors, but PSE's rendering is closer to what I'm actually seeing in the real world. I was probably mistaken about how I thought PSE had been displaying the RAW files previously.