I think, "ideological differences" apart, we could be more helpful if you could describe your problem more precisely. Which filters do you have problem using for instance. I shoot slides, I suppose though that if you use an amber filter to warm a sunset, and then instruct your RAW developer to use a 5500 Kelvin WB, you are yourself "defeating" your filter (re-correcting it toward neutral).
Use of Neutral density filters should not give you problems with WB, I guess. (Yes you can do that later in PS only if the scene is entirely within your DSLR's dynamic range. You would use ND filters if the scene spans beyond the maximum tolerable dynamic range, to avoid clipping, for which PS is no remedy).
The RAW file is some sort of a negative before development. The same negative (a black & white one) can be developed in several different ways. The same developed negative can be printed in several different ways. So different "developers" (different RAW conversion software, such as PS and Capture One) with different default settings (and because of different internal algorithms) can produce a different final output just like two different persons would produce two different prints from the same negative, and none would be "the realistic one" more than the other (though certainly some can be very irrealistic, you have a broad range of entirely "realistic" but different possibilities).
But if you "play" with your raw conversion software you can obtain the result that, in your memory and taste, is the realistic/pleasant one. In photography, even objectivity is a very subjective matter. Even if your goal is a "realistic" look, you must constantly making choices (subjective choices) in order to obtain the "realistic" look you want. Even when shooting slides, when you are confronted with a scene with a contrast exceeding the exposure latitude of your film, you have to make a choice. Any choice (sacrifying low lights, sacrifying high lights, staying in the middle and sacrifying a bit of both ends) is "objective" and "subjective" at the same time.
So there is not an objective, "faithful" way to extract and image from your RAW. RAW is useful, in your case, because by manipulating it you can arrive to that "objective" and "real" look which you look for. That means working with levels, curves, contrast, white balance, sharpening, dodging, whatever. At the end of the process, you get an "objective" picture, and never before. Somebody else will come out with a different, yet equally objective picture. Photography has always been like that (printed matter at least).
As far as the "bitty" images are concerned, I don't understand if you mean too grainy, too noisy (in that case you should check your ISO setting and keep it low for best results) or if maybe there is too unsharp mask applied to the RAW file (you should check your RAW conversion program). Actually check that your RAW conversion software supports exactly your camera. If it doesn't the result is likely to look weird and "bitty".
Regarding the "manipulation" of the image, I would like to tell you that I have seen no image that does not need manipulation to look natural. For instance, when you set WB for tungsten lights, you are falsifying your image. The white wall actually IS yellowish, and the blue ashtray actually IS brownish, under incandescent light. Your eyes see it as yellowish, brownish. But your memory - which has seen the wall and the ashtray in daylight - knows the wall is white and the ashtray is blue, and "adjusts" them to the colours it wants to see. With a bit of attention, you will soon notice that a white wall enlighted only by a blue sky is actually quite blueish. You will very easily notice the yellow colour of the white wall. You will easily see how a white car appears reddish if parked near a red one (with light reflected from the red one). Under tungsten light we apply WB (or blue filters, or different films) as a way to distort and falsify actual colours so that we can see them on the image just as we (our memory) want them to be, not as they objectively are. We know the car is white and "don't expect" that, near a blue car, the white car is actually blueish. The white marble statue you remember as white and upon which you set the gray point to eliminate the blue cast, was not white at all, objectively speaking only the blue cast is true. Really with a bit of attention you will see this blue cast everywhere in the shade on cloudless days. Saying that the daylight film is calibrated for 5500 K and not good for tungsten light is not really true. 5500K film is just perfect to reproduce your wall under tungsten light, because in that moment that wall is actually THAT yellowish (OK that is not entirely true, response of films is different from human eyes, but you get the point). Many more examples regarding exposure, focusing etc. could be made in order to demonstrate that the photographic process requires image manipulation in order to give a "natural" outcome, human brain and eyes do not work like films and sensors, monitors, printers etc.. Your mind scans the scene and focuses everything. You can never look something and see it out of focus. We focus portraits on the eyes because those are what we look first and more often. But in reality, we will never see the background out of focus.
Sorry if I went outside of the scope of your question, but with your reference to "digitally altering the image" you made me quite impossible to resist the temptation to debate on it a bit
You might say: when you shoot slides and you project them on a screen, you don't alter the colours and you have an objective vision. True, that's not manipulated. The constructive choices of the film maker try to mimic as much as they can the human vision. But humans are different, and the film which looks natural to my eyes (Astia) might look innatural to yours, and the film which looks innatural to my eyes (Velvia) might look "objective" to yours. And you have the limit of exposure latitude, which gives you a different picture than what your eyes saw. Also your lenses gave you a different perspective. Are they "true"? Or they "optically and prospectically manipulate" reality?
If you use a shift lens (or a shifting camera), you are getting parallel skyscrapers lines, which might look natural to our minds but, believe me, do not exists nowhere in nature, the laws of perspective being true for our eyes as for our cameras. So - again - you use shifting lenses in order to falsify reality so that it may appear more realistic!
Cheers
Fabrizio
