Oh, man, I should never even have entered this thread 
I admire/envy you for your clear goal and path - home studio! I am dithering as always (and perhaps even more so) between all the myriad options, hoping to chance upon that Swiss Army knife that would have me covered in any situation… 
just a quick word to say that it’s an excellent thread idea 
It is tough. My issue is DAWs confuse me, I’m not great with computers. They provide everything you could want though. At the same time, I play with a band, all invested in amps…so I have to go live sound for now too. What are you trying to accomplish musically? For practice and creative boost/getting comfortable with how to use different effects, the Zoom B3n pedal is an all in one solution for $150-$200. I’ve even used it live and in studio. Then higher up is the Helix or Headrush pedals. It’s interesting to sort through classic rig vs. new solutions. New solutions are lighter lol.
Yeah, I kinda know… it has just been a long quest for me, well more like a study/education to understand the possibilities and what would work best for home, rehearsal room, studio, live, … And I am not there yet!!
I was just trying to be funny… but was probably more likely just a bit facetious 
I have been trialing iZotope Neutron and Ozone for mixing and mastering and frankly they are excellent. They are expensive but on sale now so I decided to buy them.
Both use iZotope’s AI thing to dynamically EQ and apply dynamics to individual tracks and the whole mix.
I was doing my own with Kilohearts Multipass and that was working pretty well but the automation in the iZotope products is pretty impressive. I’m still using Multipass pretty heavily though; it (along with the Kilohearts snapins) is the one plugin I feel is most a game-changer.
This brings up another point: never, ever buy VST’s unless they are on sale. The sale price is the real price; they go on “sale” all the time.
I am loving Neutron and Ozone so far; immediately post-analysis, with minor tweaking by me, it’s producing well-EQed mixes with a mastering that is both maximized well (for loudness) and also preserving dynamics well. This image of the waveform in rendering says a lot:
Nicely saturated and yet it doesn’t have the sh*t squashed out of its dynamics.
Looks like you are nicely set up for your purposes 
Ha! Via careful buying decisions, waiting for bundle sales, and free stuff from PluginBoutique, I’ve acquired a rather ridiculous amount of music software, yeah. All for less than the cost of a (midrange) bass, too.
iZotope’s Neutron and Ozone are incredible for mixing and mastering (respectively).
They analyze either the track (Neutron) or the whole mix (Ozone) and calculate optimal EQ and channel effects like compression, limiting, etc. They aren’t perfect and generally you have to tweak what they come up with, but it saves tons of time.
In addition to the calculated static EQ, based on the analysis it locates bands that need dynamic adjusting, and applies changes to the EQ in real time in the song, like an intelligent side-channel.
It’s freaking awesome. Here’s Ozone dynamically adjusting the EQ of the whole mix, in real time:
There is no sound, right!?!?
Ahh yeah, just did a screencap to show the dynamic EQ changing in response to the mix in realtime. No audio.
Looks impressive… might be more impressive with audio, though
The lame screencap software I have can’t handle recording ASIO 
@howard What’s the lifespan for plugins? I’m kind of tired of re-buying everything as things change. New PC. New operating system. New DAW. Even new DAI hardware because the drivers won’t be updated to the new operating system.
It looks like the VST format has some better longevity to it. Even in VST3 DAW environments it looks like older VST continues to be usable. Am I thinking of this correctly? I’d really not want to re-buy all the plugins just because Windows had to create a new more secure operating system, again. This is my biggest hesitation to buy into soft solutions.
Yep, VSTs have been around a long time now and the VST2 format is still supported by almost all DAWs. In fact not all have full VST3 support yet.
When you buy plugins, they come in multiple formats; the installer will prompt to install VST, VST3, and AAX on PC; AU and AAX on the mac. And ofter will prompt for 32 and 64 bit versions of VST2.
VST2 has existed since 1999.
Many companies do regular free updates of their plugins, too.
Good to know.
I’m liking the design of the FabFilter Pro-Q 3 quite a bit. I like having the spectrum analyzer overlayed to the controls. It also will make linear phase EQ adjustments if you aren’t worried about delay, so fine for mixing and mastering. I could easily end up wanting this.
Ahh yeah their stuff is supposed to be really good, I should check it out.
Also to be clear - I’m not saying abandonware can’t happen. But I don’t think it is more risky than any other software. And the vast majority of music software is DAW plugins these days.
And one other thing to note - many have relatively rigorous licensing enforced by key managers like iLok.
this plugin looks incredible. it’s a very fine amp modeler. for someone who built a lot of tube amps (and so, understand what all those settings do) it looks like a graal.
That looks awesome, I love how modular it is. Not too expensive on sale, either, especially considering I would rather have that than a real amp.