[PaulMTC]

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There are a variety of reasons why raising preflop too infrequently will hurt you:
1. When you've got the best starting hand, you're most likely to have the best hand at showdown. The more money you get into the pot, the better.
2. Every raise and bet you make has a chance of picking up the pot immediately; why pass up a chance to take down 2 PTBB with a hand like 98s? If you have a large database, check out your PTBB/hand for various preflop holdings and notice how few of them win you more money per hand than the 0.75 PTBBs that are in the blinds alone. If you've got one limper in front, the pot now has 1.25 PTBBs in it. Picking these pots up is a serious bonus.
3. Raising preflop sets you up to win the flop VERY often with a continuation bet. OK, so you got called; that's OK! You've now got one opponent who limp/called into a pot, and the board fell with garbage. Your opponent has checked to you. When you bet the pot here, you're going to take down the pot at least 2/3 of the time, showing a VERY tidy profit. Even if you get called, your hand can improve on the turn, or you can take a free river card. The odds of you making money on this hand remain extremely high.
4. Raising preflop makes hand-reading MUCH easier. So you limped preflop with A3s and five people see a flop that comes 743r. Is your hand good? You can't even GUESS at what BB has, since it could be literally any two cards. Anybody who limped with garbage could have hit this rather nicely. However, if you raised big preflop and narrowed the field to heads-up, your odds of having the best hand on this flop are MUCH higher; it's hard for a stray 7 or 4 to have survived a preflop raise. You can narrow your opponent's holding down dramatically: he's usually holding either overcards (that missed) or possibly a pocket pair (that might be getting scared). If he check/calls your bet on the flop, you can start to narrow his holdings, assuming he's more likely to have a small pocket pair, either 22, 55, 66, or maybe 88 or 99. If a big card comes, you can bet again and easily fold out a stronger hand. Sure, it can backfire on you, but there's nothing more frustrating than having your JJ die on a flop of 733 when the big blind had 83o.
5. Raising more hands preflop disguises your big hands more effectively. If you raise 10% of the hands you play, then your opponents can narrow down your hand holdings extremely effectively when you DO raise. However, if you raise 50% of the hands you play, and you change it up based on table conditions, your hands will be MUCH stealthier. He raised from the button; is that 65s or AA? These are questions you want your opponents to have to ask. Not only does this boost the winrate for AA by getting these hands called more often and building them bigger pots, but it also boosts the winrate for 65s by concealing it much more effectively. Any gain you get from making your opponents' hands more easy to read is mirrored by the gain you get from making YOUR hands HARDER to read.

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Pokey, every single last piece of the above on why to raise pre-flop was crystal clear and made absolute sense to me.

You sir are gifted in two areas:

1. The game of poker.
2. The ability to perfectly articulate your understanding of the game to others.

Respect.