the only time i find HDR necessary and super helpful is when you're shooting some land and some sky.  generally the brightness of the sky will make the land almost pitch black so if you do hdr you can get the land bright as well as the sky and you have a good picture
an HDR shot of a basic subject won't look awesome, i've seen very few HDR shots of flowers that actually look good, but landscapes they look awesome and can be really helpful to getting all parts of the picture exposed
what you can also do is take a raw image and develop it in photoshop under 3 exposures and then combine those, it makes it so that you only need to take 1 picture