My answer is based mostly on inexperience, as the only raw (DNG) files that I have worked with were from a Leica M8 demo, but it seemed to me that some of the controls, e.g. colour temperature, highlight/shadow recovery, in raw conversions programs (Photoshop, i.e. presumably ACR, and a demo version of Aperture) were much more powerful and easier to use than trying to achieve the same effects in Photoshop when working on a tiff file (e.g. Curves).