Sonnox has never been worth the money to me, but I mostly do audio post. I use Avid's Pro Compressor and Pro Limiter because they're transparent as fuck and will do surround. I use Eventide like a rented mule. I had an H3000 D/SE up until October and once it went AAX I had little reason to keep it. They're also coming out with a bunch of the old goodies. My creative process isn't really complete without Speakerphone and Altiverb. But then, I do other things. The best, cheapest convolution reverb I know is Liquidsonics Reverberate. It's a peach. I tend to use plugins I beta-test for because, in many ways, their implementation reflects my needs. But you weren't asking about software synths. Honestly? Lots of Izotope. Trash and Iris are really creative. And I've done some seriously cool shit with Stutter Edit: