DS has a similar routine to your DD. He is 16 weeks old, so a little older but not much. He has a bottle and goes to bed in his cot at 7pm. We give him a dream feed bottle at 10pm (8oz, the little piggy!), and then he does not feed until 8am.
He sleeps v well in the first bit of the night (7-10pm), and then after his 10pm bottle he normally does a stint of 3-4 hours which is v good sleep. So we make sure we get to sleep then too! He normally then wakes up anywhere from once to 4 or 5 times between 2am and 7am when he actually finally wakes up and gets up for the day.
Twice, he actually slept through with no wakings, but they were definitely flukes!!
When he wakes, DH and I give him around 5 minutes to see if he will go back to sleep on his own. I don't really think of this as controlled crying and I haven't really read any books/methods about different sleep techniques. We just think it's common sense! We're just waiting to see what happens before we rush in.
Around 50% of the time he will groan/cry/murmer/coo for 4-5 mins and then go back to sleep on his own. And then the other 50% of the time he doesn't go back to sleep or sounds like he is getting distressed, and then we go in, rub his tummy gently whilst saying shhhhh, shhhhh, and we put his dummy in. He then goes back to sleep.
Like I say above, we have had some good nights where he has only woken up once and has gone back to sleep on his own, and we have had some bad nights where he has woken every 90 minutes, and we have had to go into him 5 times. It seems very variable but the one certainty is that his sleep is definitely poorer in the latter stages of the night. He pretty much always stirs around 4am. I read somewhere that babies go into a very light sleep cycle around that time of night, which rings true to me.
Anyway, with our ups and downs, I would definitely say the pattern is improving and has improved between week 12 and week 16: for example, if he stirs between 7pm-10pm, he now always manages to go back to sleep within 3-4 minutes of low-level crying, which we hear on the monitor. We are hoping he will get better and better at this 'self settling' until he's eventually able to do it consistently at 2am, 4am etc as well! For the time being, I am happy to take a 50% success rate in the wee small hours.
I don't think that 'pausing to see whether baby goes back to sleep' for 2, 3 or 4 minutes before rushing in to him/her is a cruel thing to do, and in my experience, it hasn't involved any of the horrid scenes of me weeping on the sofa as DH screams himself sick in the bedroom, which you might expect from 'controlled crying'.
Sorry for the mammoth post but just wanted to give an alternative view :)