Well from my experience doing B&W conversions and subtle duotones, it pretty much comes down to the post processing as it is npot a B&W sensor. I personally like to start with a mildly underexposed shot in RAW. It gives you the most detail in the pictures to mess with later, and if I want blown highlights I can have them. If i blow out the highlights on initial exposure, I can't really get that detail back later. This hedges your bets, but you can't turn a bad picture into a masterpiece. Your lighting has to be amenable to taking a good photo. Personally, if I'm taking the pictures while traveling, I bracket in RAW. Last big trip I took, if I hadn't done that, I woudl have lost a LOT of decent photos. Instead of coming home with maybe 20 keepers and 150 nice pictures out of about 600 shots, I probably would have had maybe 5 keepers and 30 or so nice pics.
Beyond that, there are MANY ways to go from color to B&W. How you go about it makes a HUGE difference for how the final product looks. Which path you takes depends a lot on the color of the interesting subjects in your picture and the backgrounds they are against.
This article gives you a pretty decent illustration of how some methods make certain colors contrast and other methods make them blend. In particular note the red and green squares on the chart and the differing methods.
CONVERSION TO B&W ARTICLE
If you want a really sharp picture, you need to also have a pretty sharp lens. You can only impart so much sharpness without creating artifacts.
Sometimes what you really want is stuff to pop rather than to be sharp. Another tool to achieve that is local contrast enhancement. You can read about that here.
Tutorials - Local Contrast Enhancement (this is built into lightroom as some adjustment, IIRC it is called clarity or clarify or something like that).