I always shoot in JPEG—so I’m pretty much clueless with shooting in RAW. However, from what I understand, RAW is like shooting undeveloped film. You have to take it into your “darkroom” (photo editor w/ RAW processor) if you want to get a good result. If you don’t want to do that, don’t shoot RAW! I’ve found my camera does a fairly decent job with processing JPEGs automatically (and I take thousands of pictures and don’t have time to process each one).
I actually spoke with our professional portrait photographer and she said that she never shoots in RAW—anything that she wants to do with a RAW image (e.g. white balance, curves) she can do with a high quality JPEG; I would think though that you might lose a little quality, and your abilities in the darkroom might be limited.
