Wow! Another tough one. Is post-editing a good idea?
Well it depends on what you define as post editing, what your asperations and goals are, your vision and dreams.
You see photography is part technical and part art. The technical side says an image should be as natural as possible. Say a portrait or landscape or bird. But even at that there is room for editing to take out highlights, raise shadows, correct exposure or white balance. For portrait it may go further in actually enhancing the persons physical appearance, however generally if that is done it should be done in a very professional manner and one that is flattering and frankly is beyond most amateurs ability.
Most should leave post-editing at a very low level as far too many, especially beginners tend to go too far. Often times I have seen beginners go to far when they first start and as they grow and mature in their abilities they tone it down.
This is not to say one should not edit but do it will care. Now some may say well one of the best known photographers, Ansel Adams, did a tremendous amount of editing! Well it is true Ansel is well known as one of the early pioneers of photography and provided us with some awesome black and white landscape photographs. But lets get a few things straight. First Ansel had the most expensive and elaborate gear available on the planet at the time, he spent hours setting up and planning his photos in an attempt to obtain the very best image he could in the camera. And yes it is always best to get the very best image you can in the camera the first time as no amount of post processing can do as good a job. Second Ansel actually did very little post-processing. What, wait, he spent hours and says in the darkroom. True enough! Have you? Do you have any idea what a darkrooms is? I have done it myself and know first hand. You see a darkroom is first developing the film to make a negative, then enlarging that negative onto photographic paper and making a final image. It is in the final paper copy most of the post-processing is done as it can easily be redone if not right. Well, I use the term easily rather loosely as is far more difficult than with software today. You see one looks at the negative carefully, in Ansel’s day that was not too difficult as he did have large format negatives. But in a darkroom you map out on the negative your intended result. Then you work with enlarger in an attempt to replicate what you desire, process the paper and let it dry to see what actually happened. This is very time consuming and precise work, you have to know what you did and keep records as if you don’t like the final result you have to start all over and change what you did in some way to try and make better. There is no undo, there is no restoring an partially created image. It is start back at the beginning and do it all over again. Each attempt is prone to possible failure, one small error and that attempt is garbage and you once again start again. You may do it a dozen or two dozen times or even more! That is what takes time in the darkroom era and yes many including myself still do black and white processing in darkrooms to this day. But in reality what Ansel did could easily be done in minutes by anybody who was even remotely proficient with Adobe Lightroom today! Yes minutes! Wow! That is not extensive post-processing you thought it was.. yes a weeks work in the darkroom could easily be boiled into minutes or hours at the most in modern software, especially in the black and white format he was using at that time.
But to answer the question should one do post-processing? The answer is absolutely. But you MUST save the image in a RAW format or you frankly are wasting your time attempting any post-processing. But generally for most the amount you need to do is really not that extensive. Having said that as you grow you may get into HDR, focus stacking and other more advanced post-processing methods that can make some truly incredible final images. And you may even be one of the ones who likes to dabble and play and have the final result really more art than photograph and that is okay too.
In the end every image that is not a RAW format has had some post processing done to it, so you either let your camera computer do the post-processing which may work if it is more capable and smarter than you.. or you do it yourself which often ends up with a better final image if you are even remotely competent.