Superior Drummer....how passable is it?

That’s one thing V Drums are really good for - practicing silently.

You won’t learn how to strike real drums and get expression out of them by playing V Drums, but you can go an awfully long way with strengthening your groove/pocket and developing limb independence, all while not making a big racket in your house.

I had a friend who was an early home recordist and he'd often add live hats to his drum machine tracks and it did make those songs feel more human. 

If you ever have the space, I highly encourage it, even if you don't end up doing your own drum tracking.  I think it's a good idea for any musician to spend some time on other instruments. It really makes us more better, and more well rounded musicians, and producers.

That’s probably very true. Bet it makes you a better player rhythmically/timing on everything.

1000%

Everyone assumed I woodshedded on piano. Nope. Barely practiced. But the drumming tightened up all my playing especially piano.

Yeah true. It won’t work in every situation. I built my studio with some pretty decent isolation so it works for me.

There really is a huge range of sounds in the expansion packs for SD3. You can’t just listen to the product pages to get a real sense of what each expansion sounds like. Evil Drums isn’t even in the same neighborhood as Decades or Legacy of Rock, for instance.

Like all things it depends on the song, quite a few 80's metal bands sounded like their hi-hats was taken from an early drum machine even though I know they mic'd a real kit. Superior for me has always been a bit more natural in terms of dynamics but as I've been saying for years (and as Ragan said) it's a bit flat & 2D however to avoid the clash caused by descriptive means I find all Toontrack kits phasey. That's what collapses the sounds and adds a nice bit of wash to the signal.

It's somewhat like the Roland Kits, the TD-9 in terms of fidelity hits hard even if it sounds a bit fake but as you get up the ranks (TD-27, TD-50) it gets worse and worse in terms of phase or fidelity. I'm far from the only one whose mentioned this if you've ever looked at an e-drum forum. So if you need a background kit to fill a song out and add a beat superior is great, if you need something more up front and fake for a modern rock song Steven Slate does the job. What I haven't found is a VSTI drum kit that can do both like a real acoustic can (which can be shaped from raw and responsive to tight and focussed), I'm looking at this currently www.soniccouture.com/en/products/g76-sun-drums/.

I did the same thing with my Roland TD-25. It was pretty good. Always took some fixing/massaging after the fact, but not a lot.

The standard used to be Alesis D4 and those 90s records sound better than what comes out now. If they could make that sound good, people can make Superior Drummer sound good much more easily.

Godflesh - Streetcleaner used an HR-16 and sounds amazing.

It’s not the size of your kit chief, it’s what you do with it.

They’re all bouncy mesh heads to me, real kits are one thing but when it comes to e-drums I ain’t too bothered what they are as they’re again all the same to me.

I have owned a few different module brands and overall roland is the best for triggering and latency. (sounds still suck)
The digital ride and snare are just the same technology (piezos) with the controller and A/D moved into the cymbal its self. They don't really output a lot of data. You only need positional sensing and velocity. Sure they do some additional calculations onboard, parallel processing of signals, but it isn't vastly different from what they were doing before.
Largely it just locks you into the roland ecosystem with a proprietary connection for their acoustic sized cymbals taking market share away from the likes of ATV.