Your way of thinking is 100% correct. You buy an SLR for its flexability and opperability not to shoot RAW.
People very often talk like you cant edit a JPG.... Of course you can !
Its the same as everything else on an SLR... its an optional tool. There are pros and cons with watever format you shoot in.
Raw is great if you are after perfection in your work. Raw basicly allows a little more headroom in most areas.
You can gain a little more sharpness a little more dynamic range a little more subtle colour changes etc etc.
A raw file in itself though is useless to anyone. You keep them as you would a negative. They still end up as a JPG at the end of the day.
Shooting JPG can help a beginner become a better photographer, in a way as shooting slide film did for film. It forces you to try harder and
think about exposure more etc. You have less lattidude ! There are lots of auto options like lens correction that can be utalised when shooting JPG. The differance in quality between the two once as JPGs needs to be viewed at 100% to see any slight differances in quality.
This is known as pixel peeping. For viewing at screen sizes or normal to large prints, I would like to see anyone tell me which started life as a RAW
and which was shot as a JPG without using the EXIF info. There are plenty of draw backs for shooting JPG too of course
I dont ever think its a good idea to recomend a beginner to shoot RAW either. The fact is they will get better results from JPG unless there edditing skills and knowledge is upto par. You also have to ask yourself, when is the quality enough ?
Not everyone has the wish or desire or even the need to sit for hours edditing through hundreds of raw files.
I doubt very much anyone would know what format anyone used just by looking at the pics though.
If i didnt have the need for RAW files and I was not a Pro photographer I think I would shoot in JPG for everything.
This would not have been true a few years ago, but the qualty of Digital cameras has gone very high indeed over the years.
I would advise any JPG shooters to make a copy of the originals before you start edditing though