Unless you can ace every exposure and the contrast keeps within the dynamic range of the chip, etc., shoot raw and forget the jpeg. Jpeg is fine for a terminal file heading to a client or onto the web, but to allow the camera as programed by a person working in a cubical to determine which 95% of the image to get thrown away is beyond me. I want all the info to make that choice back in my studio on how to process the image.
I just went through some of my work from Serbia a few years ago. It was originally process through Photoshop 4.x and ACR from a few generations ago.
When I reprocessed the files using the current ACR and its noise reduction, I was able to get much better photos from the original captures. Had I shot everything in jpeg just to save space, I'd be stuck with what the camera gave me with little left to work the image better. What you shoot in jpeg is what you get, including both compression and sharpening artifacts. Better to simply use the NEF 12-bit compressed than to shoot even high-quality jpeg unless you can control all the light and then ace the color and exposure.
Sure, even with raw you've got to make it a point to get things in the ball part with the exposure, color balance, etc. but think of it this way, a jpeg file is like Kodachrome, if you ace it it's fine. With NEF (raw), you've got a color negative that you can process today and as the software improves, go back to that same negative and reprocess it with newer/better tools. This comes in quite handy, IMO.
Though the D800 does crete quite a bit of file bloat shooting day to day, on crop mode (1.3x and 1.5x-DX modes), the raw files are smaller and either one gets me higher res than my daily shooters. That makes the D800 on a par with the D7000 with its 16MP (nearly the same resolution of the D800 at 1.5x) and the D7100 with its 24MP. The D800 shoots 24mp at 1.3x. In any case, the files are still larger than any of my daily shooters. It's like a built in TC almost.
With cards and hard drives being so large and cheap today, there's little reason to shoot jpeg or worry too much about file bloat in the overall scheme of things. My career in digital began back in the days of floppies, a big computer had 512K of ram and a hard drive was humungous at 3 MB and the size of a VCR (if you can remember what a VCR is;-).
Realistically most of my money files are in the range of 10-12 MP captures and everything larger is mainly gravy, getting me more detail for the final image. Better to have more to start then to make a silk purse from a sow's ear from a dinky file like I've got to do for my print clients at times.