Makes sense about the RGB/CMYK breakdown but if we're printing bitmap with vector background doesn't that cause a conflict? We have printed RGB in the past trying to push colors with good results
Rendering intents specify to the RIP how to handle specific object types. You can mix and match different types for different objects.The RIP sorts it out and it does it far better than anything else you might bring to bear on the problem. Regardless of what your average buck profilista says, all you need is one or maybe two good profiles. I've been printing lo these many years and I have exactly two, count 'em two, profiles and I can't remember the last time I used the second one. They're both variations of Oracal's 3561G stock profile. I print on every media imaginable, and probably some not so imaginable, using just one of the two with never, as in ever, a problem hitting some specific color or another.
You set your rendering intents for bitmaps to "Perceptual" and set the rest of the rendering intents to whatever tickles your fancy. Setting the rest of them to "No Color Correction" or, failing that, "Saturation" is never a bad idea but you might want to print a Pantone chart with that rendering intent just to see exactly what you're going to get color-wise. Never forget, and I grow weary of saying it as well, what comes out of the printer is the truth. Repeat that as many times as necessary so that it's burned indelibly into your brain. What's on your monitor or a stack of Pantone color samples or any thing else is not the truth. Not by a long shot.
One last note; RGB bitmaps with a 'Perceptual' rendering intent print so well, genuine what you see is what you get, that I never hesitate to flatten something into an RGB jpg file and bring it directly into Production Manager. Very seldom do I print out of Flexi unless I'm doing a contour cut. Then, most likely, I'll export out of whatever, usually Corel, into a PDF with just the contour cut path as a vector object and everything else flattened into an RGB bitmap with 'RGB specified for the PDF then, in Flexi, mark the cut path at a contour cut by selecting the path, then doing Arrange->Contour Cut->Make Contour Cut. Almost always you have to ungroup and unmask everything and then delete the then useless black mask rectangle. Or just bring in the bitmap and create the contour in Flexi Just depends on the job and how I happen to feel at the moment.