You can more convincingly create and enhance warmth, definition and sense of space - the quality of fatness . Hands-on and intuitive, without menus. To highlight the strong points in the music, you select tools that add the right colors - compression, EQ and sense of ambiance. Excellent performance comes only two ways. Names like Fairchild, Sontec and Massenburg are well known at the high end of the business.
Most engineers purchase a collection of favorite processors.
You can improve on stock gear, but few people have the background to pull this off. It requires experience in audio and radio frequency circuit design, studio engineering, along with an insane amount of testing and listening. You need to absorb a history of techniques that go back as far as the 1920's. If you study the work of the giants who invented the classic tools, you can learn to sweeten sound in ways not possible with commercial equipment. Ten years ago, as I transitioned from recording to mastering, this is what I did.