always RAW.
I tend to use nikon's basic progam, altho, i have been fooling around with a program for nikon's called toneup . a whooping 20 dollars and is based on the math used for Capture
With my Fuji i generally use Photoshop as the software from Fuji is really poor )IMHO.
With my beginning students i avoid the discussion about RAW as most of them just want to take better family pics. With the Intermediate classes we go into greater detail about RAW; both pros and cons and then they can decided for themselves.
For some folks the downside is the sizes of the files, storage and PP; however, for me, it is the only way i want to work .