Web-weaver,
Many thanks for your contribution. Funnily enough, I agree wholeheartedly with the thrust of your comment about not getting bogged down in this sort of detail - my concern was purely to streamline and simplify importing, but with settings specific to each of my cameras, as they are substantially different beasts... Starting to investigate the options quickly led to a world of questions(!) I think I'm now there, and it is all useful learning. In line with your comments, I'm actually a bit of a heretic with regards to colour management, but we can save that for another thread!
Thanks to all- some really helpful stuff thrown up that just gives me the confidence in set-up that I was after.