Yes, I'd say the Raw converter is doing the disappearing; with film the manufacturer and lab does the heavy lifting for colors, with digital you need to become your own expert -or hire one.
When I was in the color science biz, if I had time to kill at SPIE and other conferences, I'd sometimes watch papers or attend workshops on color film and paper design. I came away hugely impressed by the artfulness of the engineers doing the work, and the immense difficulties that they faced given the stacking of the emulsions, the dyes they had to work with, the way the developers and couplers worked. In the case of printing, they had to stack two highly compromised processes on top of each other, using each one to compensate for the departures from fidelity of the other. After a few of these sessions, I stopped whining about the lack of accuracy of film compared to digital capture, and became flatly amazed that color film worked at all. By the way, it was clear that the film system designers were not aiming for accurate color at all; pleasing was the target.
Compared to film, designing an accurate digital color system is a piece of cake.
With respect to who does the work, I think that chemical color printing was harder than digital editing. Dealing with color shifts when dodging and burning. Making contrast reduction or sharpening masks. Pin registration. Yuk.
Jim
