If you have already taken 'far too many' then what are you worried about?

Taking pictures rather than sitting in and stressing over test charts isn't
dumb.  It was also meant as friendly advice not a complaint.

unlike the word according to jps? "thou shalt not use jpegs.  Do not take
the quick and easy jpeg path, the path of RAW is that of the righteous"

and it

your definitely attending the wrong clubs.  If you can tell its been
photoshopped then you will get marked down.  Digital manipulation for the
sake of it and to show how good you are at it is pointless.  Unless it adds
something to the picture and the composition forget about it.  you don't get
a guaranteed winner just because it is a technically difficult shot either.
Then again if its technically flawed it won't win either.  properly trained
judges are not easily pleased.

Well, yes.  JPEG is something you go to for final output on-screen; I
don't go there before that stage.  I've got some scripts to batch-generate
JPEGs in Photoshop for various purposes, and that's about it.

Well, it is both extreme and unusual; extreme in that it pushes the
equipment, and unusual in that most people don't do it.  Just the other
day I was looking around for people doing the kind of street shooting
I've been doing lately, wanting to see what others were doing to get
inspiration and motivation and such.  I couldn't find anyone doing it,
at least not anyone who has their stuff online.  Though since I don't
have *my* stuff online yet, I shouldn't complain. :)  But I'd be very
interested to see nighttime street shooting, if anyone does that other
than me.

Walking around the city at night is exactly what I've been doing a lot
of lately, so I'm pretty familiar with low-light shooting.  I worried
about underexposure at high ISO until I came to the realization that
when the light is that low, it generally sucks anyway, and when the
light sucks, the picture sucks, no matter how much light there happens
to be or how interesting the subject is.

In practice I haven't had to go above ISO 800, and that only rarely.
There *have* been times when I wanted a shot and couldn't get it due
to the light level, but I was wishing for better light, not higher
sensitivity.  There was one this past weekend where I did get the
shot, but an extra stop of sensitivity would have come in handy (I
don't bother with ISO 1600 since it's a digital push), but I'm not
going to lose any sleep over it.  I was using a 35mm f/2, so I could
have achieved what I wanted with a 35/1.4, I just don't happen to
have one.

Under-exposure at 1600 (or 800, probably more usefully, since it
wouldn't have the digital push, at least on my camera) is interesting
to me because of what it can tell you about the camera and sensor
and the revelations about what could be done to make them better.
Actually shooting that way, not so much, at least not until they
improve the image quality -- which, as you've pointed out many times,
can have as much to do with the raw conversion as anything else, a
fact that makes it frustrating since at that point it's just a matter
of better conversion software and/or camera firmware.

I suspect the fact that the software developers like Adobe aren't
concentrating effort in that area has to do with the fact that the
kind of low-light shooting we're talking about is both extreme and
unusual, so customer demand tends to focus on other areas.  (It
becomes tiresome to see so many people yelling about Camera Raw
not matching the in-camera JPEGs by default, as if I'm supposed to
care what an in-camera JPEG would look like.)

Even so, it's vanishingly rare that I find myself actually wishing
even for ISO 1600 in actual practice.  Of course, for street shooting
I tend to leave lenses slower than f/2 at home.  If you're trying to
do it with an f/4.5-5.6 lens or something, that's different, but at
that point you're using the wrong equipment anyhow.