Jim,
You make very fair points. From experimenting with a few images so far, a lot of the develop settings are not translatable onto the raw, as you suggest. And, some of the work that I need to do involves leveraging the (significant) additional exposure latitude that has now "become available", for example.
On the other hand, some of the edits. Cropping, metadata and keywords, and things in that category carry over just fine.
So far I have not figured out a way to do this, and I am suspicious that it doesn't exist. That's fine, but I thought I'd ask in case there was a magic way.
Ben