Hard to dislike the 32mm f/1.4 lens (PICS)...

Obviously your technique works very well - your images speak for themselves. The image quality is consistently impressive and appealing - thanks as always.

OTOH....  It is hard (especially for control nuts - looking at me) to knowingly give up any image quality at all. So with every JPEG shutter click there is that  “Oh dear, maybe I could have squeezed out two percent more...” moment.

One of the great values of the images you post is to demonstrate that in the real world, clinging to this concern at a time when DIGIC is so mature and capable is pointless for the great majority of us. The fact is, DIGIC can typically do it at least as well as we can, as you show. Since you also leave room for tweaking at a subtle level that JPEG’s can handle without falling apart, you have the best of both worlds.

Combine that with the very large number of images one can now generate in a short time, and having the camera do as much as possible becomes even more attractive. I would rather leave editing large piles of RAW’s to the pros; I don’t have the time or patience. A wedding photographer needs every last bit of maneuverability - I don’t. The challenge is remembering this instead of flicking over to the RAW setting!

You argued well for this point years ago, but with current DIGIC it becomes an even more forceful argument.

In my case, there is another side to it too. I won’t subscribe, and LR6 is inevitably aging and beginning to fail; catalogs get messed up very easily. It is scary. I am amazed you can still work with version 4. So I am going to switch to ACDSee which now combines a DAM and most LR and Photoshop features in a single app. But since I have no experience yet with the results of its RAW processing, especially regarding color, letting Canon do it as a JPEG in DIGIC makes lots of sense.

I don’t think that a JPEG necessarily locks one into a particular “look”. That comes more from composing and exposing the image... Save RAW for special and unusual conditions... But this digresses back to a very old discussion....