Yeah, RAW is basically going back to the darkroom. When you let your camera give you a jpeg, it is basically deciding on the edits to make and then throwing away all the extra info so you can't decide differently. With RAW you are in complete control. If you do want to shoot RAW a lot, I recommend making some filters in Lightroom or Actions in Photoshop to quickly apply the settings that you usually like, then you can tweak them for each photo. There is a learning curve to processing yourself, but once you learn, you can do it fairly quickly.

While some people do definitely go overboard with postprocessing, if you look at the old film masters, it was exactly the same. Ansel Adams, the Master himself, would spend hours in the darkroom on a single image. He was the HDR extremist Facebook guy of his day.

The real problem with RAW is space. What we should do is after we process the RAW ourselves, we delete the RAW file and keep the jpeg. But what happens is everyone saves the RAW because I might want to reedit it someday. Before you know it, you have several TB sized external hard drives and always need more. ....not that I'm speaking from experience or anything...