Oxford Drum Gate - I'm convinced

For just a plain single channel gate, I do like DMG TrackGate. Simple, has a lookahead function, you can set a range as well as a ratio. Most importantly, it usually does a very good job.
For drums, I did like Oxford Drum Gate, but the CPU hit is too much to put on 6-8 drum mics. I like Cymbal Killer quite a bit too for drums but it has bugs. The developer has been trying to sort it out but no idea when it will function correctly.

I just tested this out on some blast beasts. It can't take the cymbals off the snare and dampens the beats. This is for slower, steady playing. Same with drum leveler. Trying to set it to catch the ghost notes causes all hell to break loose.

That being said, less of a sucking sound than ReaGate, which is free and still works. PSP Infinistrip gate weakened the hits yet kept the snare wires the most intact.

I can highly recommend using Soyuz 013s as tom mics, to avoid ugly cymbal bleed. I stopped using 421s for the exact same reason as the OP. For me, they've more or less made gating toms unnecessary.

Oktava MK-102's have proven good for toms here, designed for good off axis response.

This is the best gate I've ever used. I finally am warming up to it. It's the best Sonnox plug. Indispensable now.

I haven’t had to deal with players that bad who weren’t in something that couldn’t be just sample replaced so I’ve never used it yet.

drum leveler worked best when I demoed it on steady beats or for guys who don’t have any groove and you can add it in better than with parallel compression or pumping. You really have to eq the side chain to come close to what drum gate can do at isolating drums. I’ll buy it eventually when I need auto-align for multi miced sources i can’t deal with manually quickly because it comes in a bundle.

to get drum gate working well, select what you’re gating, tune the loudest transient to the drum to capture the spectral profile, then lower the threshold to dig in to catch all the ghost notes. It will still sound like shit like a standard gate but not clicky and awful. So go over to the decay tab, turn down the softness whatever meter to like 10% so the ghost notes don’t sound like crap, and then turn down the damping to turn it into a drastic expander rather than a hard gate. It sounds very natural but you still lose a some of the body. So just use some shelves, tubes/iron, or slightly compress 1-2 db with something legit good after. Sounds really good.

This kills Expurgate, Pro-G, and the Oxford Dynamics gate which sucks except as an literal noise gate to strip “silence” and cut off tape noise.