I would agree with pretty much everything you say about MP3 quality. A lot of people will say that 192k VBR is good enough to be transparent, but in my testing it was not. That said, the Lame encoder has come a long way and at very high bitrates the quality is excellent. I decided to just go with 320k because disks are cheap now and it's still much better compression than you get with the lossless codecs, and for me 320 is totally transparent.
If your primary reason for ripping is to make compilation CD's, it's probably not worth it. But I have a large collection of MP3's on my server, and since I use an HTPC in my home theater I have access to all of my music this way without having to shuffle CD's.
BTW there's a tool that you can use to perform blind testing at
pcabx.com. I think it's easy for people to come to whatever conclusion they want to when they're not doing true blind-testing, so this tool is pretty useful for separating actual differences from imagined ones.
