I think what easyjim mentioned about goals gets to the heart of it. I personally don't care as much about representing what happened that night as I do making the CD (or whatever) as enjoyable a listen as possible.
Same thing here.
I'm not a huge fan of the " the-room-as-it-was-that-night" recording approach. For one thing," as-it-was" for whom? My mics or my ears? I'll always give preference to my ears. My mics do not seat in my living room with a cold beer to listen to a recent recording. I do.
Minor adjustments with features like Normalize ou a light EQ wouldn't alter anything. You're not adding anything that wasn't already there. It's just a matter of tonal balance.
But I'm just a newbie. I respect different opinions. 
My attitude towards this is simple. If you really know what your doing and you have good reference monitors and you can make your recording sound better WHY NOT? Do what you can to make it more enjoyable for you and anyone that might want to listen to it. If recording engineers took the attitude of not fixing things.. Well every record out there would sound like a huge pile of shit. Why because very few guitar players for example ever crouch down to the same level as the speakers in the amps they use to hear that asstone... They stand up and hell it sounds good blowing past my knees it must sound good down there lol... But as far as the recordings I make to show people what my mics sound like.. I leave them as is unedited.. Why because some of you might not have the gear/skill I do to make a huge difference that I can make to just about any recording. And its not a true representation of my product. So if your not selling your mics... I think you should do what ever you have too to make your recordings sound better in the process you will learn the difference between 5k and 8k * frequencies * and hell that's not a bad thing.. I apologize to the people here that already know the difference 
hehe...
I learned how to do live sound not by leaving things as they are but my changing them. In the begginging most of the things I changed made it sound like ass.. After a while I leaned how to spin the knobs correctly. You always have undo in a recording that your editing.. I wish I had undo as a live engineer
Care for another take? I'm a bit in both worlds, and I fully agree it's about the goals and the potential audience.
I find the challenges of recording unamplified music quite different from recording a FOH amplified concert. My recordings of unamplified classical, jazz, bluegrass or whatever usually require little to no eq adjustment but have huge dynamic ranges that are the challenge. When recording the challenge is noise at the quiet end while allowing enough headroom to capture the big dynamics. On the playback side, my playback system can't handle those big dynamics easily. I have to jump for the volume knob like Moke says. These recordings would not work well at all on my friend's even more modest home stereos, ipods and car stereos. That's just how it is, I can live with a larger dynamic range than they can. There's the goal of the potential audience part. But I haven't committed my recordings to that mastering adjustment yet. More on that below.
I often eq my recordings of FOH amplified events (including amplified acoustic music) during playback and these often need little or no dynamic adjustment. But this is a problem of an altogether different nature. With the dynamic unamplified recordings, I think a super duper playback system
could handle the levels and I wouldn't have to make adjustments, where the FOH amplified stuff needs eq to fix basic frequency problems that are not short comings in the playback chain. Those eq adjustments can make a huge difference, but it takes a long time and alot of fine tweaking to get it just right - when it is right, there is no denying it's right. It's like night and day to whoever walks in the room. Like Chris says I've learned alot in seriously listening and going through that process. Some of the things I've learned are: It takes alot of time, concentration and dedication to do that properly. Some recordings (and some recording deficiencies) seem to 'take' eq adjustments very well, others do not. It's sometimes difficult to connect the 'mental idea' of what frequency band needs adjustment and what my ears are hearing. It's very easy to make something sound different, it's quite difficult to make it sound better. It's much too easy to make it sound horrible.
Done correctly, eq can make the recording sound more real, and much truer to being there. I highly appreciate the 'purist' ideal and find a well done two mic Aud recording often sounds better because of that simplicity. But that's not a 'true representation of the event' in any sense. It is an illusion, sometimes a breathtakingly real one, but an illusion none the less. If you can improve on your 2 mic purist recordings by selecting different mics with different responses, than that is essentially also manipulating the recording, just in a different way. Which is truer? Chris' note on representing the 'sound' of his mics is different, in that case it's the quality of the mic that is being listened for, not the 'true representation of the event'. A different goal.
I don't touch my original recordings, but I on occasion create eq'd versions. I only do that hesitantly though because I lack the tools to do it properly: a well trained brain, high quality neutral playback equipment and room, and quality hardware/software. I know that any adjustments I make are adjusting for subjective things besides the objective sound of the recording. Like it or not I'm also adjusting for my playback system and room so the adjustments that people tell me make it sound great and 'like I'm there' when they stop by my living room, may not translate to their car, ipod or stereo. Most of them would not likely notice some resonance at say 85hz or at 7khz (and certainly couldn't identify the frequency if they did hear something amiss), but I would and I'd be upset to hear it that way. In that case my 'mastering' wouldn't be much of an improvement, just a bastardization.
I haven't created dynamically modified versions yet. The main reason is that I can turn the volume knob easier than setting the eq! The flip side is that my understanding of adjusting the dynamics is much less evolved than adjusting the eq. I could set a volume envelope for loud applause and print that to the file like a recording of my volume knob adjustments, but I haven't learned enough to get good compressor or limiter settings that don't degrade the sound to my ears. That ear knowledge is more difficult than learning effective eq for me.
Mastering engineers are highly specialized, have custom built rooms and loads of specialized, expensive gear, and good ones are paid handsomely for their work. If anyone could do it by tweaking a few knobs, those guys would be out of business. I recognize the potential for mastering, and the potential for me to screw it up at the same time. I don't take that lightly, which is why I've hesitated for so long to get into it. I also realize that even if I had the best skills and tools I'd still have to decide on which compromises to make. Once it's out there it's forever.
In the end it's all about compromising for the requirements, desires and expectations of the potential audience. I agree with the poor assessments of many commercial releases and 'instant live' recordings though I've only heard a couple of them. Those are compromised for the marketplace, squashed for car-ready dynamics, etc.
But I'm a weirdo that thinks even Aud's with cardioid mics sound flat, squashed and closed in most of the time. Blumlein, subcards or omnis sound more 'real' to me. I've got my hands full working on getting the most out of the recording side so far, with little time to get to the post production dark side.
Appologies for all the words.
