Thanks for the tip; I'm kicking myself for overlooking this one.
I've tried it and it does help, but not as much as I expected. Maybe I'm just too focused on sharpness, but the difference between monitor outputs in both Capture NX-D and ACR is, indeed, noticeable.
It is obvious that the sharpness data are contained in the NEF file, but, for some reason, ACR does not access them. I tried the latest NEF codec from Nikon, to no avail, so I'm still stumped.
So far, the only thing that works is taking all the ACR sharpness adjustments (amount, radius and detail) almost to the max, which I fear my compromise overall image quality a bit. Maybe it all comes down to whether one likes a slightly blurry image better than a slightly noisy one, or vice versa.