For my professional career I was UAD guy. But recently I have been collecting Waves plugins. Their new pricing model is appealing. S/W not H/W...
H/W too. Add some flavor of SoundGrid server, and you've got HW acceleration just like the UAD stuff. And networked IO to boot.
Ah.. I meant H/W as in iron. Mics, preamps, etc.
But Soundgrid is interesting. That said my relatively new/cheap i7 runs endless amount of plugins now. The whole DSP thing is sort of uneeded now. I guess unless you want to track through the plugin... Even then my MADI card has low enough latency I already could if I wanted to.