I've been shooting exclusively with raw mode for 3.5 years or so, and I haven't found it too much of a burden. When I load pictures from the camera into the computer, I generally let the software convert them with "camera settings", yielding the same JPEG's you would have gotten straight from the camera. It's all batch, even with Canon's poor software, so you get it started and then go off to read e-mail or something. For the occasional image where I really care, I go in and put more effort into it, typically generating a 16-bit TIFF and spending 10 minutes with Photoshop's "Adjust Levels" to get everything agonizingly just so.

Also, I only use Canon tools for the raw conversion. Thereafter, I use a mix of standard JPEG-handling tools. The latest Canon ZoomBrowser is nice enough, however, to generate sub-directories that include the shooting date in their name, which is a perfectly rational way to organize huge amounts of data. I usually append something about the subject I shot that day so I can later find what I'm looking for quickly.