reading the original post several times, it seems the question remained somewhat untouched
. of course i have my own favourite software, but reading your post again, the first thing that seems apropriate to state is: what is the question? you mean you are quite happy with your current software and workflow? in that case why bother, carry on. if your only concern is that it is discontinued, and thus a dead end, my advice would be to give some opensource software a go (ufraw will work nicely on windows, it has been mentioned), if you happen to like the software and does what you need it to do, the advantage is that it is future proof (open source means that, as long as there is interest, it will never be "discontinued", somebody can always take it over and continue developing it; open source means other things too, btw, this is just one of them
). another advantage is that oss software tends to be platform independent (or, to be technically correct, cross-platform firendly, as you cannot run the windows ufraw on a power pc), this means that, should you chose to switch to another system, most likely there will already be a port of ufraw available, which means less stress (no need to go through the choices, learning curves and so on all over again).
hope this helps a bit.