Yes — in-camera JPEGs commonly have processing applied, including white balance, contrast, noise reduction, and often fairly strong sharpening. That alone can make a JPEG look more readable than an untouched RAW.

For your RAW, the key steps are:

1. Apply white balance.
2. Try a different demosaicing algorithm — the artifacts you describe can come from poor demosaicing.
3. Add sharpening as a separate step.

UFRaw is quite old, so you may get better results from a more modern RAW processor such as RawTherapee or Darktable.

Also, don’t assume the JPEG is truly “better”: strong sharpening can create white halos around edges, and JPEG compression can smear fine detail. If the RAW starts from slightly soft focus or motion blur, processing can only improve it so much.

So yes, there is still a point to using the RAW as an exercise: it gives you control over demosaicing, white balance, and sharpening. But to match the camera JPEG, you’ll usually need to replicate some of the camera’s built-in processing rather than expect the RAW to look finished on its own.