As Nic says, raw frustration and general photographic malaise are two different things. Raw is like anything else in high tech - if you want to work with the latest, you have to HAVE the latest. A 1988 PC won't run the current version of Windows, and MS-DOS 2.0 won't run Office 2011. Adobe tends to add camera raw support for their latest software but not make the effort to make it backward compatible - if they did, how far back should they go?
Similarly, whenever there's a new camera, it takes the software folks a little while to work it all out and offer support. Sometimes this is fairly complex, like with a whole new type of sensor (like the X-trans or Sigma Foveon, which still isn't supported and may not be), sometimes its so simple it makes you wonder why it even takes ten seconds. I was rather surprised after my first shots with the Fuji XM1, which has the SAME sensor and processing as the XE1 and X-Pro1 and X100s (all supported) that Lightroom 5 wouldn't open its files. I'm reasonably certain that if I'd been willing to use some exif tool to change the identifier in those files to XE1 from XM1, they'd have opened flawlessly. But, that's just how it is. I don't blame the Adobe folks for wanting to have a look and make sure there are no additional tricks in those files that they need to account for before "supporting" them.
And people say they should all just have a universal standard, but even universal isn't all that universal. Ricoh uses Adobe's "universal" DNG format, but when the GR came out, its DNG files had some real color issues in the latest version of Lightroom, until Adobe updated the color profile which they released more or less with Lightroom 5 and which they may or may not have ever bothered to update Lightroom 4 to work with (kind of stopped following that issue once I had LR 5 and didn't have the GR anymore)? So, yeah, it was "universal" and it opened, but it didn't really open RIGHT until the software folks did what they do to support it. And if everything was universal, might that not hamper advances and ingenuity? The Foveon sensors were pretty outside the box and I'd have hated what they'd have become if they'd been spending all of their time figuring out how to bend those files into DNGs rather than how to make them amazing, which they are.
Everything has its hassles and most of them are for a reason, even if its hard to see it sometimes. I'd still rather deal with the occasional hassles and frustration and support issues than only have jpegs available to shoot with. Because for most cameras with most shots, there's just a LOT more there to work with in the raw files. And if it seems like a lot of work, its not if you just set up LR or Aperture to process your files on import - that's really no more work and only slightly more time consuming that using jpeg. And when you get to that really tough shot that is either meh or amazing, depending on what you do with it, you can almost always do a lot more with a raw file than a jpeg.
-Ray
