I think it was a bit too much wishful thinking on my end to say I'm shooting JPG by default, but I use it often, that is certain.
Intially my problem was getting my RAF development in LR to come close to the overall detail I could get from the SOOC JPG. It wasn't until recently that I've been able to get nearly equal.
Essentially I was presented with a choice of either getting excellent detail and the color rendering I want at the risk of not having the dynamic range and color adjustment capabilities of RAW - OR getting those adjustment capabilities but struggling with color tone and fine detail (especially foliage).
I've since found that using the HueLight color profile (available for $10) combined with my modified sharpening settings (compared to my other cameras) gives me results I like as much or more than JPGs. The Adobe default profile is horrible to me, really bad with oranges, yellows, blues and purples. The HueLight profile fixes that. For sharpening I use 70, 1.2, 10, 60 and its a great initial sharpening setting for me with minimal sharpening halos or 'watercolor' effects, I apply output sharpening when I export to JPG and the images look excellent (I don't normally with my other cameras)
I've tried Capture One and I own Aperture, both do a better job at fine details than LR but the gap between them is very narrow, but I don't think I'm willing to switch my library/catalog to either:
1. Capture One Pro doesn't show you the contents of a subfolder tree. So in my case I have folder tree that is 2013/08-Aug/FamilyParty and 2013/08-Aug/ClientJob4. If you click on 08-Aug folder you will see NOTHING. You have to click on the bottom level folders to view contents. At first I thought this is no big deal, but after trying to use it as my primary library for a couple weeks I realized this is a huge burden. I've also found when opening my catalog you can see it 'count' the number of images as if its loading information, I have 22,000 images in this catalog and it takes around 120 seconds to finish counting. I can't wait 2 minutes to open Capture One every time. I opened a ticket with support but basically they say they hope to improve that in the future.
2. Aperture has a great DAM workflow and I love the user interface, but it struggles with other aspects of image processing. It is really not good with noise, at all, while the X-Trans is low noise to begin with it still struggles with some of my images. It doesn't have lens correction tools. It's ability to recover from shadows and pull down highlights is a fraction of what LR can do. The biggest one - it has no adjustment history, change something and if you don't undo it right away you won't have any way to remember what you had it set to.
Basically Capture One gives me the best image quality - but LR5 is now 96-98% as good for me - but you lose out on speed and catalog features of LR. Aperture does great detail as well, has in my opinion a better user interface and a very robust library system, but much more limited RAW processing.
Hope that helps!
