very interesting, jeff.
i downloaded the profiles packed by the kind users there, and was playing around (ufraw). my quick observations:
the pentax1 profile seems very "efficient", it seems to bring out a lot of shadow detail, the histogram shows it as well. the saturation apparently goes down, and the contrast too, that's good, i can tweak that after. the preview i get with that profile is nowhere near the jpeg embedded by the camera in the raw file.
i played with other profiles as well, they are mostly.. very funky
, (read: not much use).
the ufraw default, "colormatrix", is amazing, in that it is very close to the camera jpeg, with the one exception that it looks considerably darker (easily fixed), i have no idea how it works, but it still seems to me it works bloody well
. perhaps that's the reason i forgot about input profiles finally (i was in the same situation as nanthiel some time ago)
hope this helps
edit: i dug around for some more info, this thread came up which might help nanthiel with some insight on RT specifically (gabor, the main developer, gives some very interesting explanations):
http://www.rawtherapee.com/forum/vie...er=asc&start=0