What exactly do you mean with “working with” vs. “editing”? If this means feeding jpeg photos to Gimp, it is a kind of “shame”. I’m not even a hobby photographer, but still like what mentioned raw processors can pull out of average raw photos. They can usually provide better output, for jpeg export or for intermediate 16-bit (or more) tiffs, meant to be further edited in Gimp. I believe. But you can, luckily, do whatever you want, and still get good pictures. And you will.