I have no desired to persuade anyone to do photography as I do, but some recent posts about postprocessing, shooting SOOC, and shooting film led me to organize my own thoughts about the role of postprocessing. So I may just be talking to myself, but perhaps this will spark some interesting discussion.
First, some posts say, in effect, 'I don't postprocess (much or at all) because I was used to shooting film.' So, did the great film photographers not postprocess? There are some photographic media that don't allow processing after initial development--in the semi-modern era, most notably slides--but in fact, many of the greats did extensive darkroom work to make the final image look different from the original. Ansel Adams used to say that "the negative is the score; the print is the performance." His own darkroom work was often quite complex, and it was not just a matter of manipulating tones; he even removed things. For a great example, watch this video: https://www.shutterbug.com/content/watch-ansel-adams-son-discuss-how-his-father-made-his-most-famous-photo-video.. The title is self-explanatory. Toward the end, Ansel's son Michael returns to this point and he shows the original photo--the simple reversal of the negative--to the final print. He also shows a large chart that was Ansel's plan for postprocessing, most of which I (and his son) couldn't interpret.
When I did my own wet darkroom work, I did some of what would now count as postprocessing, but it was pretty simple stuff, just straightforward dodging and burning.
So, what's different with digital? The obvious one is that postprocessing is enormously easier, and the range of what one can alter is orders of magnitude greater. However, there is another difference that I think is more fundamental: there is no original image. In earlier photographic systems, a blind developing process always produced a visible image--either a negative or a positive. In digital, the initial capture doesn't. Even in generating a 'neutral' image from the digital capture, someone has to make decisions about how the image is rendered. And I don't think I have ever seen anyone deliberately display a "neutral" or a "faithful" image; when people display SOOC images, they usually are selecting a picture style that determines the postprocessing changes made by the camera's computer. They are postprocessing, but asking someone else to make the decisions. That's often a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but that doesn't alter the fact that a decision has been made about postprocessing.
So, where does that leave me? My own tastes run strongly toward realism--e.g., highly detailed macros. I dislike many of the unrealistic genres I see, e.g., highly tone-mapped HDR. And I was initially daunted by postprocessing because the seemingly endless array of techniques and the time required to sort through them to find what I wanted and practice it. Nonetheless, I find postprocessing an absolutely essential part of the process, and I virtually never shoot jpeg. In some cases, the changes I make from the initial LR rendering are so small that I might has well have used a picture style and shot jpeg to get my processing done. Other times, no jpeg would have come close, and postprocessing gives me the pleasure of seeing the image at least approximate what I want.
Despite decades of shooting film (I started doing darkroom work in 1968), I wouldn't consider not doing my own digital processing. I have no interest in extreme stuff, but the fact that I can now do so much more than simple dodging and burning is a pleasure. I have prints hanging on my walls and others' that would have been trashed without it.
Just my perspective. To each her or his own. However, I do bristle a bit when someone implies that shooting SOOC and making use of another person's predetermined processing recipe is somehow purer photography.