When I got my first DSLR I shot jpg. It was what I knew from the P&S cameras I had before.
Eventually I screwed up a setting and got blue pictures. I needed those pictures and they were not repeatable. It took hours with what I knew at the time to get something that looked reasonable from them. So I decided to try raw.

Shot raw+jpg for a while. Tried several editing programs and settled on Lightroom. Once I got comfortable with editing raw files I dropped the jpg, saving 30% of the card space. I was too cheap to just buy larger cards.

Then when I got to 10,000 images in my photopile I started having trouble finding things. Started to get serious about Lightroom's organization capabilities. That solved that problem.

Now I shoot raw only. I can get good jpgs if I pay attention to what I'm doing, but I want to avoid that. Shooting raw forces me to put my images through the raw conversion software (Lightroom in my case). Since my raw conversion program does my organizing also, everything gets into the organizing system. If I were to shoot jpg, I would be tempted to use the image directly, without putting it into Lightroom. If that happens, and the photo isn't in my LR catalog, there will come a time when I will not be able to find that photo because I have no good way to search for it beyond just randomly looking at images. That time interval is getting shorter as I am getting older.

In fact I frequently get into trouble when I take iPhone photos. They're right there and I use them immediately. If I don't download them and place them into the LR catalog, I have to depend on the iPhone Photos app, which shows me everything in chronological order. That means I have to remember when I took the photo I'm looking for. I'm terrible at remembering dates, so that is a bust for me. I can put them into albums, but I have so many albums that that only decreases the problem by about a factor of 2. Not nearly enough.

You get the raw file either way and even if you only shoot raw you still get a JPEG. The camera is going to create the JPEG whether you want it or not because it embeds a copy of the JPEG into the raw file.

If you shoot raw + JPEG the implication is that you want the JPEG and should then expose to get as good a JPEG as possible. This will typically compromise the raw file to some degree as the exposure that creates a good JPEG is most likely reduced some from what you could apply to the raw file.

With digital sensors more exposure equals better image quality. However too much exposure nukes your highlights and your dead. It's kind of like playing chicken with a concrete wall. You want to stop as close to the wall as you can but never hit the wall. The camera engineers know this well and so when they adjust the software in your camera that creates JPEGs they tend to be conservative chicken players and they stop well before hitting the wall. You get a good JPEG and certainly a usable raw file.

But knowing what I just told you it starts to nag at you that your raw files could have been exposed more and would be just a little better. Most of the time it won't matter but then you eventually take a photo in which a little more exposure to the raw file really would have helped. Then you start considering just how good at playing chicken you can get and you start creating better raw files and bad JPEGs. Then there's no sense in creating bad JPEGs so you stop bothering.

You have a Nikon camera and Nikon's engineers play a pretty mean game of chicken. They cut the difference pretty close. This situation varies one camera maker to the next. I have a Fuji camera and they're as scared of that concrete wall as Trump is of an angry black woman. So if I expose to get a good JPEG with my Fuji my raw files are often underexposed by half of what they could be. I don't bother then to save the JPEGs since the exposures I set typically blow the JPEGs.

The moral of the story then is to a greater or lesser degree depending on the camera brand you can't set a best exposure for both the JPEG and raw -- you gotta pick one.

Joe