Originally posted by Rondec That's fine and for certain styles of photography (portraits, travel snaps), out of camera jpegs can get you there 90 percent of the time. Even there, if you are shooting portraits of a teen girl (or any woman for that matter) professionally, they are going to want you to do some touching up after the fact, cleaning up blemishes, smoothing skin, etc. That's the sort of thing that straight out of camera jpegs just can't take care of.
People sometimes act like post processing is a modern phenomenon, but if you read Ansel Adams series of books, you realize that he was a perfectionist about every aspect of photography, from the equipment he used to the developing process, and finally the printing process. He took copious notes during shooting in order to give him the best chance of getting the max out of his images. I still feel as though landscape photos are the place where you need post processing to get the highest quality. The dynamic range in many of these images is far more than what can be taken care of in an out of camera jpeg, even from a Fuji.
Oh, I don't disagree that RAW will get you that bit further, and although I don't do professional work, I'd certainly use any advantage I could if so.
We're getting a bit further off topic here, but as a long time film user before digital, and for landscapes now, I agree with your comments around post-processing - it's simply now become more accessible and (far) easier. Per my earlier comments, a jpg can be a valid representation of a scene, where the content, composition and lighting makes sense, out of the camera.
Not always though. As an example, this is from C1 from a beginner me using that software, and due to the highlight torture, the jpg doesn't reflect anything close to the scene (Fuji though it may be):
Grazing by
Aaron, on Flickr
Back on topic (although looking at the OP's latest threads, I suspect their future is Fuji), I guess that it depends on what your workflow and output is, and what colours you like.