You commit common fallacy by thinking that processing/manipulations improve quality.
So do you think that the RAW images produced by CHDK should be used unprocessed as that is the best "quality"? Have you ever actually looked at any of those images ? Maybe the A570 is unique but from what I have seen on my camera's RAW images and read about others here on the forum, there is significant barrel distortion in an unprocessed image. How do those look to you when printed out at highest "quality" (i.e. unprocessed) and hanging on your wall ?
EDIT : Bright and sunny day with 18" of fresh snow here so I went out and played with my camera. As long as I was not using wide angle setttings (i.e. barrell distortion) then both my JPG and DNG pictures looked really good. I think I can say the DNG's were slightly sharper and the contrast was better. Reds looked better on the DNG's but the greens were a little better on the JPG's. Of coarse this is when zooming into pictures on my 21" Samsung LCD monitor - not the greatest in the world - but at least the images were side-by-side using the Shotwell program.
