exodus,
Please don't spread all this misinformation. There is ZERO information lost in conversion to dng. The information is bit-for-bit identical regardless of 12 or 14 bit in the original and regardless on what kind of compression you used in the camera. Actually the (lossless!) compression scheme dng uses is much more efficient than what Nikon provides, so you actually have smaller files with no information lost. Technically dng is really a far better format than nef or canon raw. This is not opinion, just plain obvious fact. Again, converting to dng does NOT result in any data loss. The only thing you lose is the ability to open the file in Nikon software. This is why Adobe allows you to embed the original file, so later you could extract the original nef from it if ever you need it again but really there is no point to doing this if you simply make good backups of the originals.
Further, Nikon has NOT spent years perfecting their file scheme. Nef is simply a version of tiff with a few trivial extensions. It is very easy to read ANY nef file even from new cameras.The only time it was hard was when Nikon idiotically decided to encrypt the white balance info and refused to tell anybody the encryption key because they wanted everybody to license their very buggy sdk. That got them in quite some hot water and luckily they gave up doing this with later cameras. Anyway, the reason it takes a while for support for new cameras to be added is absolutely not that they have to learn how to read the file. It is that you need the actual camera in hand to shoot standard targets in standard light conditions, so you can build color rendition profiles. Nikon and Canon do not at all share prerelease cameras or technical data with Adobe, Apple, Dxo, etc. So those companies have to go out and buy new cameras when they come out and then do the profiling. Nikon also does not provide any standard profiles for their cameras. This creates the delay that you see between a new camera release and when the raw from these cameras gets official support from the software makers. Again I urge you to read TH's excellent commentary that really captures the feelings of most pros on these situations here: http://www.dslrbodies.com/accessories/software-for-nikon-dslrs/software-news/day-12-of-the -d810-workflow.html.