Seems like no matter how I adjust the settings, I get serious white washout of the image

Like Veritas stated, the intensity is too high. All HDRI's are different. I have one freebie HDRI that I cranked all the way up, and its still always too dark to really ever use, and some other HDRI's have to be taken down to an intensity of 5-10.

Also, try experimenting with a very low "HDRI Effect" and a higher Intensity for different "looks" to the scene.

Also, what about material settings?!?

I have had to tweak them very little, if anything I'm raising my Ambience levels from my usual of 0-5 to now using 10-15 with some of the HDRI's. I'm getting some really dark/deep shadows on the meshes even though I usually don't normally take my Sun/Moon Shadow Instensity above 65.

Yet, when doing say a "promo" type of HDRI render that has a plane with a flat light color, I'll crank my Shadow Intensity to 100. The shadows hitting the plane look better imo.

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