Scanning Colour Negatives: Raw or Not?

Introduction
Some think the optimal way of scanning colour negatives is to minimize editing intervention at the scan stage by scanning exactly what the scanner produces unaltered, then opening the image in Photoshop, converting it to a positive and making other adjustments as needed. Stated advantages of this workflow are that no data gets altered or destroyed on the way to Photoshop and there is no need to bother about selecting and possibly re-configuring conversion profiles in the scanning software appropriate for the brand of negative film one is scanning.
The two big issues doing without the negative profiles in the scanning software are that the film has an “orange” mask (or some other hue) that must be neutralized and scans of negatives tend to come out of the “raw” process rather flat and lifeless. These issues need to be corrected somewhere.
In SilverFast, the default option is to use Negafix, select the closest Negafix profile for the film one is scanning, tweak it a bit as ...