Best Sleeper Analog Sounding Plugins?

hype died around kazrog. It’s not a transformer emulation with a hysteresis algorithm, just an interesting digital distortion thing that sounded pretty cool but not stupid or loud enough for modern music where they want things audibly distorted so out comes decapitator, radiator, and vintage warmer. You know things are bad when the fuse tascam and Grampian pa amp emulations are too nice

it’s just distortion. Like I don’t care if decapitator aliases. It makes things sound different. I don’t care what hardware it was modeled on. I just don’t care. It’s for making things sound different or applying distortion or a hardware modeled non linear transfer curve (the a ampex model)

Vintage warmer is just a complex clipper yet I’ve used it as a fuzz pedal and for vocal distortion. It can be hard to hear in multiband mode set right but still does something cool to the bass and highs. It sounds better than the modeled fuzz plugins and easily better than the Kevin shields endorsed fender blender remake

Only when something is a model of something real where you know what it does or is a tool that’s mostly dysfunctional (waves cla 76 for something entirely dysfunctional) it doesn’t behave as expected or doesn’t work, do people seem to care but that but then the internet will shout that the cla 76 of x gear is fine because y mixer is successful and uses it even if his mixes sound totally unnatural.

Then there’s stuff like the distorted ssl plugins and of all the outboard ssl pieces I’ve used, like yeah they have a sound, often cleaner than cheap and value engineered interfaces, but the audible distortion was from deliberately non-linear processes like distortion or compression and not some simple or exaggerated circuit model or polynomial wave shaper where there is no way in hell give anyone using waves ssl or ev2 or ssl 4b or 4e or whatever the sound of passing through a bunch of old vcas, underspecced maybe dying coupling caps, fet switches, ne 5532 or 5534, etc and all the other things digital eliminates that are way more complex and low level than a simple distortion algorithm. The plugins are toys except for the ssl native one that has nothing to do with the hardware besides the gui and is just some more distorted and less fucntional what you already own thing. The channel strip compressors and gates sound so bad next to the Oxford dynamics conceived by the g series original strip designer Paul frindle and the ssl native bus comp is just awful next to the glue or Oxford limiter set up like a bus comp. Like the non eq parts of the ssl native in no way sound or function as well as most of their analog equivalents and by that I mean any common analog compressor or gate.

The fuse models of weird old pro gear are pretty subtle usually unless they’re pushed when crazy stuff happens.

What you are giving as an example are unique tools that add something. A complex clipper still adds something. In my opinion and after Testing the BB Tubes doesn't add anything unique or in terms of workflow. That the aliasing isn't working is annoying, but if the plugin would give me something cool or etc then sure, but this doesn't- 

Fuse and Oxford is on a completely different level than nearly all of Waves