Leitz wrote:
It appears to me that I can convert an unedited RAW file to TIFF, and do as much or more editing on that TIFF file as could have been done on the RAW file. Or am I all wet?
You might not have a good grasp of the conceptual difference between a "RAW file" and a "TIFF file".
The camera produces raw sensor data and saves it in the RAW file. That is not image data. The raw sensor data does not define a specific image, and it cannot be viewed or edited as an image. The data encodes color using a Bayer Color Filter Array, which has a strange property of not saving a specific value of color for a specific image pixel location! Instead there are many (nearly an infinite variety) of valid values, and to have an image that can be viewed or edited means deciding which of the potential values is going to be used. That process is known as "converting", but technically it is demosaicing or interpolation. A matrix (commonly 4x4 or greater) of values from nearby sensor locations are used to generate the specific values for each pixel. Hence editing is not really possible because changing the raw data value at a given location does different things to many pixel values. Ultimately, raw sensor data is never edited. It is converted to an RGB image format, and the RGB format is edited.
TIFF and JPEG are different RGB image formats, as are PNG, GIF, PPM and others. They all encode color into three channels, one each for red, green and blue. The data defines one specific image. It can be viewed and it can be edited because changing one specific value for a given pixel affects only that value and only that pixel.
However, your question probably isn't really what you stated (and isn't about editing a RAW file), but most likely should be about editing the RGB image at the time it is created by a RAW converter, before it is saved as a TIFF formatted file.
With TIFF files it really doesn't make any difference, as long as the TIFF is a 16-bit depth format. It is exactly the same data that the RAW converter works on. And that is true because TIFF uses lossless compression.
JPEG is the other most commonly used RGB image file format, and it uses lossy compression, as well as being an 8-bit format. The effect is that once the RAW converter writes it's RGB information to the JPEG file... it can never be recovered exactly as it was!
That basically means a TIFF format works best for intermediate files, which will be futher edited. And JPEG should be limited to the final product as it will be displayed or printed.