The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York offered an online course on photography as art that I took. During the course they pulled an Ansel Adams print out of their collection and what the curator said has forever stuck with me. Ansel Adams was a good photographer. But what made Ansel Adams was not the pictures that he took but they way in which they were printed.
Post processing is nothing more than the digital darkroom. Your raw file (and you should shoot raw) is your negative. You can take that negative to a drug store and get a perfectly acceptable image, but they're not going to deepen or reveal shadows, they're not going to balance the highlights, they're not going to worry that the reds are oversaturated but the greens are under.
I've been shooting seriously for a decade now after playing around with cameras my entire life, and I'm a good photographer. I am a good photographer in that I can identify an interesting subject, find a proper angle to shoot it, and execute the capture. But when you look at my images if you see anything that really grabs your eye it's almost always not the image that came out of the camera but the way in which I've "printed" it for your viewing. If you counted up the minutes I've invested in the last decade learning new techniques in various pieces of post processing software it would likely consume months of time. And when I look back at the things I was tremendously proud of early on - images that I was asked to display in galleries - I'm almost embarrassed by some of them now.
I put some images up on my personal Facebook wall over the weekend that were essentially my takes on the Bernie Sanders memes that were wildly popular here a week ago and an old high school acquaintance is a professional fashion and fine art photographer and she reached out to me and asked if I did professional photo retouching, because she thought the attention to detail that I paid in these silly images was striking - things like matching shading and light sources and color balance. I had never felt prouder of the work I put in
after the shot was taken.
I say all this to tell you that
nothing is cheating provided you have a vision for your "print". Everything is either a tool to create a masterpiece or a weapon to destroy it, and you'll do both over time. But the art doesn't start nor stop at the click of the shutter, it exists on both sides of it. What you need to do is to learn to wield and eventually master the tools your photos require. You'll put some down along the way and pick up others. That's all good. They didn't build rocket ships with a hammer and nails just because that's what they used to use to build things. We progress. And while some will want to talk about the way things used to be done and how much easier it is now ask them why they're not going to work in a horse and buggy.