walking in the RAW for HDR

Since shooting the bracketed that I was then taking into my preferred HDRi process, such as Picturenaut, originally only worked with. jpeg files, I was essentially forced to take all my bracketed stuff in both .jpeg & RAW. If I used a 5 set bracketing, then I would get 10 large photos, just to create one. With picturenaut 3.2 I am now able to process RAW files and store 16 or 32 bit tiff versions, and at least the 16bit tiff are readable in Lightroom.4.1 So my question is does the extra info within a RAW file give the HDR software more power? And can I turn off taking the .jpeg copy? So after a little fiddling and testing. I think I can answer MAYBE to the first question and PROBABLY to the second.

Can you spot the differences in the images below. Both where processed with Picturenaut 3.2, from a set of 5 bracketed exposures and both used the same autoalignment and ghost removal settings. Both were then taken into the Photoreceptor (Reinhard) Tone mapping. They have ben exported as jpeg (8 bit colour) for presentation here. The one on the right uses ,jpeg friles as created in the camera (my Pentax K20D).the one on the left was processed using the RAW images (.pef files). The differences are very subtle!