I have been reading this thread with great interest. I am not taking a stand on the Raw vs Jpeg discussion. Whatever works for you....stick to it.
I will however make one point in favour of Raw processing. Nobody mentioned it before so here it is. I was pointed to it by MR of the Luminous landscape. Watching a tutorial on LR. He said something among the lines: As Raw conversion software evolves it allows you to make your raw file better with each software upgrade. and he is right. I started using raw with my first Dslr, a Nikon D70S. At that time RSE (Raw Shooter Essential) was a free and very highly regarded piece of software. (Two years later Adobe bought them and implemented a lot of their techniques into the development of LR 1) If I compare the D70S NEF files processed in Raw Shooter to the same files re-processed in LR3 after about 7 years I look in AWE at the difference in quality the latter is able to pull out of them.
So remember this when you start using Raw as your processing work flow.
In about 5-8 years from now, you can witness the re-birth of your favourite old files. So like good wine........The older the raw files, the better they get.