My question is simple: if you use 3rd party software to convert a rasterized image file to a vector image file, will the resultant quality be good enough for commercial print media?
In this case, consider Illustrator to be off limits.
There’s no hard and fast answer to this.
I’ve converted some raster images to vector in Inkscape and found the result to be surprisingly good when scaled up - in other cases, the result has looked blobby and weird.
It depends on the characteristics of the image - factors such as contrast, depth of field/focus, general ‘quality’ of the picture and even the subject material (a field of flowers, for example, may vectorise more comfortably than a portrait of a person)
It also depends on the skill of the editor - my wife uses Inkscape (free) to produce cutting paths for craft projects. She Google’s images and then turns them into a vector path using the Trace tool. Some of her edits are really good (Disney characters for our photo albums, and logos for other places we have visited). She just has a good eye and trims and simplifies the nodes. But you have to be careful and she isn’t scaling the image to a huge size. YMMV.