Best sound from Blu-Ray

Getting into home theater can be a pretty bewildering experience, with all 
the techonology, and changes, occurring now.  Let's narrow it down to just

the audio portion, and just from Blu-Ray.

There are basically 3 "high end" audio formats - DTS-MA and TrueHD
(lossless 
compressed), and PCM (uncompressed).  And there are basically 2 ways to
get 
the compressed ones - bitstreamed from your player and decoded in your 
receiver, or decoded in your player.  Is one or the other of the formats 
better, and is decoding preferrable on the player or the reciever?

For the other formats, how much better are these?  Is "core" DTS a lot 
better than regular Dolby 5.1?  Is DTS-MA a lot better than core DTS?  Or 
are these pretty subtle differences?

In most cases there isn't much choice.  A Blu-Ray might only have Dolby
and 
TrueHD.  Or PCM and Dolby.  Is there a benefit to favoring one format over

another when selecting your equipment, considering you usually can't have 
everything?